For Neither Ever, Nor Never, Goodbye
by A. Murray
Summary: Do you believe in fate, Mr Huntsman? ...and he does now, as his dreams of a girl with raven-black hair start to take shape in reality and he's in search of her or truth -although he's not sure there's a difference. But he's learning that mistakes and guilt can haunt a lifetime, and every lifetime after, and sometimes, we are doomed to curses of our own making. AU, Snow/Huntsman
1. Chapter 1

_Title: _For Neither Ever, Nor Never, Goodbye

_Disclaimer: _I just don't own at all… but I desperately wish I did.

_Rating: _T- for troublesome themes, violence and imagery, and implied something-or-other in the future

_Summary: Do you believe in fate, Mr Huntsman? _And he does now, as his dreams of a girl with raven-black hair start to take shape in reality and he's traveling across the country, in search of her or truth -although he's not sure there's a difference. But he's learning that mistakes and guilt can haunt a lifetime, and every lifetime after. And sometimes, we are doomed to curses of our own making.

_Characters/Pairings: _mostly Huntsman/Snow, heavily implied Huntsman/Sarah.

_Notes: _(**on setting-) **very alternate universe, set as modern day as you can get it. Eric Huntsman is a paramedic, working in an as yet nameless town. **(on block quote/italicized chapter starters-) **this has a soundtrack in my own head and sometimes lines pop out at me. If applicable, they will be posted at the beginning of a chapter they complement. **(on story-) **inspired by both a strange imagining, and some idea I am sure I have seen mentioned elsewhere. Acknowledgements, apologies, and accolades all go to the idea and its creator, if they do indeed exist, though I have forgotten now who it might be. Either way, this is something different for me, and I am supremely excited to see how it ends up. **(on author's own failings-) **a warning: I am impressively talented at taking forever to update, so I charge my readers with this: motivate me. This is a story I want to tell, but I need to know people want to hear it. So read, and please review. Thank you! :D

_Dedication: _to _**DorianGrey91**_ for being an amazing author… and for inspiring me to break out of my one-shots. Also: go read Dorian's stories, because they will blow your mighty socks off.

* * *

_**then you took me by surprise**_

_**i'm dreaming 'bout those dreamy eyes  
i never knew - i never knew**_

. . ._**  
**_

_Eric dreams of her again. The girl with the braid of black hair. _

_It is a different dream every time it comes to him, although the edges remain familiar. And she, always she, stays fixed and true regardless. A beating beautiful heart in the center of his recurrent imaginings. _

_Here, now, there is a field through which they wander. The tips of her fingers trail across the blossoms of the wildflowers. He follows her, content to follow, and to watch._

_There's a heavy scent of summer to the air; all his dreams are as full, as real as this. He can feel the heat of the sun, see the shimmer it brings to the skin of his arm. He can taste the fragrance of the flowers and the soft air, touch the coarse tops of the tall grass. Even a snatch of her hair or a fleeting touch of her hand feel as real to him as anything he's ever known. More than real in fact._

_She leads him to the edge of the field, and the shallow stream that runs between a man made channel of soft-tilled earth. They stand, letting the cool water wash upon their legs. Her dress is hitched up around her knees -a gingham that he loves so well- and there's a joy swept across her red lips. _

_Lips reddened by his own. Kisses he's shared, and will share forever._

_The sunlight dances off her skin and her shining eyes. She drops one knot of her dress into the water and places a pale hand across his eyes._

_Her voice is a whisper, a laugh. "Come find me," she tempts._

_Her hand slips from his face. He opens his eyes and she is gone._

_. . . _

Eric woke. The stiff chair of the waiting room dug into his back and he stretched. Every muscle cried out in protest. He rolled his neck and reached for his Styrofoam cup of coffee. Still warm. He'd only been asleep for maybe ten minutes then.

It was just after four am. Possibly a Tuesday. Although he couldn't be sure. Those ten minutes of reprieve had been the only of it's kind in the past twenty four hours, and naps such as that the only kind of real sleep he'd been getting since Sarah had left.

Without her, things didn't feel right anymore in the apartment. The bed was too hard, the TV echoed off the empty walls, food burned easily under his inexperienced hands. He noticed the little things that filled the silence now instead of her voice, and her laugh: the lonely drip of a faucet he'd meant to fix long ago or the squeak of a loose floorboard. Everything was settling unfamiliar around him in the wake of her absence like dust clouds in sallow sunlight. It was hard to sleep, or sleep well without her beside him, and three weeks of unrest were doing it's job.

Part of him wished desperately for her return, but thoughts of that nature were unkind and he didn't like to dwell on them.

So he'd been forced to a steady diet of service station food and Janice's coffee these past weeks. The prepackaged burgers and turkey sandwiches were passable, but Janice's coffee only truly refreshed. He didn't know how, but that woman could work wonders with a coffee pot. It was a crime that the third floor of Mercy Light Lutheran kept her talents all to themselves. The waiting room she kept lovingly filled daily felt a half mile walk from the cafeteria, but worth it.

"Another double?" Janice inquired from behind her horn-rimmed glasses. She wasn't old enough to wear the monstrous eyewear out of habit so Eric determined she did it for nostalgia. Because everything about Janice screamed of a bygone era: her clothes, her hippie hairstyle, her bluesy taste in music. She was an eclectic mystery bag of decades past. But working the night shift gave her more than enough leeway to be who she wanted, right down to the fresh set of fake flowers she brought in every Sunday. Janice was highly allergic to nearly every real flower imaginable but she thought the presence of something bright did wonders for the patients.

Eric swished back a hearty gulp of coffee and nodded. He couldn't remember the last time he hadn't been on call or covering for someone else, much less the last day he had off. He'd already been on ten hours and he had another six to go.

Janice shook her head, tsking her tongue like some greater misdeed had been done than Eric working a few extra hours. "You're work too hard darling. Are you sleeping well?" And he didn't miss the way her face took on that look that everyone's did recently: that look that said they were more worried about him than they should be, although they wouldn't say it aloud. Most of them knew about Sarah leaving; she'd been a part of his life for six years and the look they gave him made it clear they thought it was only a matter of time before it broke him. Maybe they were right. Either way, Eric had begun to hate that look.

"Not really," he admitted, determined to remain honest, no matter their silent suspicions. "But Dr Muir hooked me up with something to help me sleep and I'm not on call until Thursday so I plan on being thoroughly out of commission until then."

Her fears were satiated. Janice was overly compassionate like that. "Good," she said. "Because I saw you dozing off in that chair and that just won't do. You're gonna get an awful neck ache."

As if on cue, his neck twinged. Eric broke into a laugh. "You're a sweetheart for caring, Jan."

The woman smiled and it made him feel a little better, considering.

But just like that, his break was cut short. Eric's radio buzzed then and Tom's voice broke through from the ambulance. "Eric. We're needed out. Pile up on the old highway. Marie called it in. Sounds pretty bad."

Eric heaved a sigh and bid Janice goodbye. Traffic accidents were always bad.

. . .

And it was. A mess of steel and shattered windshield all over the intersection of Hayworth and Old 12.

The intersection was infamous. It was too close to a freeway exit, lacked a four-way stop, and boasted a blind zone that would make anyone pray to their maker before venturing out. People and paramedics alike had complained for ages that the corner was a death trap. Eric hated to be right when it came to things like this.

From the look of things it was hard to tell, but it could have been the old pickup that caused it. Or the shiny silver sedan now thrown off into the brush, its side crushed in like a soup can. Or the black-in-the-almost-sunrise Volvo, it's front bent _wrong_ around the frame of the pickup. Any one or all three. Regardless, it was a disaster.

Another ambulance from Mercy was already on the scene; Eric spotted Duke and Freeman across the blacktop. Cop cars and onlookers alike gathered around the perimeter. Lights flashed and strobed in the darkness. Tom swore as they approached the scene but they wasted no time in rushing out to help. Duke seemed to have a hold on things already, barking out orders like the fifty year old veteran he was.

The pavement was still warm from the skid marks of the Volvo, and the broken engine tinked around the frame of the pickup. It was a sorry sight and he was sure, from the way Freeman carried on, that the driver wasn't going to make it.

Eric gave himself to the service of Duke while Tom went off to help Freeman and the cops; he was sure he wouldn't be any use on his own in his current state of mind. He could feel his resolve and energy slipping. The coffee wasn't holding its own after all.

Eric was on a run back from the ambulance, when his eyes caught the flash of something and stopped in his tracks.

_It couldn't be._

_She_ was there, among the wreckage. Trapped between the Volvo and the truck, pinned so perceptibly he didn't know how anyone could have missed her before -perhaps she had been thrown through the windshield and lost somehow in the chaos of response. With a cry he rushed across the ground, falling to his knees beside her. His heart pounded, but his head cleared in a rush as he turned the side of her face toward him.

It was her. The girl in his dreams. Impossible as it may have been, he could mistake her features for no other.

She was a far cry from the happy young thing she had been. Now, she was broken and mangled, her pale skin turned pink and marred with wasted blood. She was a wreck of bruised skin and dying breath. Eric felt his heart clog his throat and his stomach do a sick turn. She was beautiful, even in this last moment before her death.

He shouted aloud as she came to, suddenly, her eyes flickering fast as she faded, her body kicking out the last resources of stubborn life. There was a haze of pain in her green eyes, a look so foreign from that of before. She seemed only to notice him and then forget him in the same instant.

He shouted again, barely aware of the frantic sound to his voice. He tried to look for ways to stop up the blood, seal up her wounds, to move her without damaging her frail body even more but his searching hands were calmed by the grasp of her own. She clung to him as if he were life itself, her grip a frenzied demand for his attention. Blood gurgled in her throat from ruined lungs as she expelled what strength she could in a last breath.

"Save me," she whispered, her voice as soft and broken as a winged prayer.

Eric went cold and numb. He heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and resounding shouts, but all afar off, as though he were sinking slowly underwater. He stared hard and fearful on her faded face until hands brought him out of his trance -heavy hands jerking on his shoulder and a voice shouting his name. He broke free and looked away, eyes wet and tears running down his face.

"Help her," he begged, his own voice a ruin of its own.

It was Duke who had answered his call and stood at his shoulder. His movements were slow, slower than Eric thought they should be, as he looked from Eric to the cause of his distress. It was almost imperceptible then, the slowly slink of something firm and guarded rising up into his weathered eyes. His face transitioned quickly from shock to a sadness beyond words and years. Duke placed his wide old hand again on Eric's shoulder, this time reassuringly, and Eric felt the difference in the man beside him, felt him change.

"Eric," he said, his tone clear-cut and without guile, "there's no one here."

It was true. Eric turned to look, quick and disbelieving, but no body lay wasted before him. His hands held only empty air. She was gone. He was alone amongst the rubble, shouting help for the ghost of his weary dreams -nothing more than a hallucination of his exhaustion.

A new fear gripped him hard and merciless and he stumbled backwards. _She had never been._

_. . .  
_

The call woke him sometime in the evening.

Eric rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and sat up quickly enough to remind him that he wasn't quite sober from the night before. As if the multiple beer bottles on his nightstand weren't enough of proof. He viewed them with a scowl as he fumbled for his cell phone; Sarah hated when he left garbage lying around.

Marie was on the other end of the line. She sounded stressed, and worried. He knew the tone well: she'd used the very same on him less than a month ago.

"Last night…" Marie began and then paused, deciding on a different lead in to the bad news. "I think it would be wise for you to take the rest of the week off."

Maybe it was the pill the Dr Muir has prescribed. Or the case of beers he'd washed it down with. Maybe it was just the everything of the past month finally catching up to him -including but not limited to, yet perhaps hinging most upon, the events of the past morning. But the reason was of no matter, for when Eric opened his mouth to argue, all he said was:

"Ok."

Marie didn't even bother to hide her sigh of relief.

"Ok," she answered. "Just take the weekend to do something for yourself. I don't want to see your face until Monday. We can discuss matters then." She had paused somewhere in there near the end, obviously searching for the right word even though the papers of his looming termination were possibly staring her right in the face. After all, one couldn't go around hallucinating victims and expect to keep their jobs.

Still, he was able to strangle out a, "Thanks, Marie," just before she hung up.

Eric stared at the cell phone and then off into the darkened bedroom.

He didn't deserve time off. In fact, he hated time off. He needed to be in constant motion, never a dull moment into which unpleasantness could sneak. Yet it was true: he needed this, no matter the way in which it came; he was in desperate need of a vacation. Maybe more than he'd realized before.

Mo nudged him then, crawling and stretching out from under a mound of covers. The feline was already purring, his mottled fur standing up in all directions from the static electricity. Eric scrubbed the underside of his chin absently as he established the ultimate problem with a handful of time off:

_What was he going to do?_

"What do you think, Moses?" Eric asked the cat. Mo, as expected, gave no reply but to redouble his demand for attention.

The cat had been just another of Sarah's strays. She had such a penchant for forlorn things and Eric was sure that was how he'd fit first into her life: he was lost, and she had guided him home.

His heart ached suddenly, like it did always at the thought of her. Mo and him: she'd left them both behind.

Eric scrambled out of bed, and away from the unpleasantness of his wandering thoughts. The floor tilted only slightly but he made it around his apartment without much difficulty. The motions of the everyday came as second nature; he didn't need to give them much thought as his brain was working steadily on other things, his suddenly free weekend, and as far as possible from his lapse of togetherness from the previous morning.

He was halfway through heating up a found Hot Pocket, and three-fourths down a list of things he'd been putting off for just such a weekend as this -way beyond convinced one of those things needed to be a revisit to a shrink- when the apartment phone rang.

He'd made it a rule long ago that all land-line calls would go first through the answering machine and he wasn't about to change that honored tradition now. Four rings and the machine picked up: it was a Sarah's voice that asked callers to leave a message. He'd yet to find the strength of heart to change it, even if she didn't live there anymore.

The caller was Tom. And he was calling to make sure Eric was OK. He'd heard about Marie's decree then, or perhaps known it was inevitable. Either way, Tom finished his message on a lame note: offering a half-hearted invitation out fishing that weekend, the familiar turn of pity twisting his tone.

The microwave dinged as though a bell of fate had just rung. _Fishing_. Eric hadn't been out on the lake in, well, quite too long. His father had always gone when the going had gone difficult so why not his son? The idea was appealing, in a way he hadn't expected. He could already see himself on the highway, heading out to the cabin, where the air was clear and the world less than pressing. It was just what he needed perhaps, clear air and open space. He could already feel himself moving away from everything, from dreams and exhaustion and queer looks, and toward something better, something he'd been desiring unconsciously for a long time.

"Well, what do you think, Mo?" He inquired again, biting into the warm flaky crust. The cat brushed against his legs and meowed expectantly. Eric dropped a chunk of cheesy ham to the linoleum and Moses wasted no time in pouncing upon it.

"Yeah," Eric sighed, "that's what I thought too."


	2. Chapter 2

_Big Thanks: _to all my wonderful reviewers. Such kinds words you all gave me, and I thank you for likewise taking the chance on this journey. I hope this update has come quickly enough, and pleases.

...a few words in response to questions posed in reviews: Eric has already "met" Snow. Yes, her name might be altered in some way. Sarah has _left_ Eric, although the whole story on that has yet to be told.

* * *

Planning for a trip to the lake was a cinch. Easier than he'd imagined in fact. His neighbor agreed to watch Moses for him, and take care of his mail. She was an older lady, without family, and much too pleased over the challenge of looking after his opinionated feline.

Eric had charted out his destination on a crisp new map -he'd never gotten around to purchasing a GPS-, amazed he remembered the area after all these years, and loaded up his old truck with dusty gear.

Packing was the hard part. More than once during the ordeal of searching and finding, packing and repacking, he'd paused to laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole thing. Fishing? Who had he become? Other men fished, men who wore overalls and high-water boots -men who knew what they were doing. Not Eric, whose last excursion had been nearly twenty-four years ago with a wee cast-and-reel he'd been gifted by his uncle. And yet the idea nagged at him, in a way he couldn't shake, despite the many attempts to convince himself otherwise -one being a bribe for a weekend of Die Hard marathons.

Bruce Willis was hard to pass up, yet somehow he found the strength.

Because he felt, well, _destined _seemed a connotative word, but there was no other for it. Everything fit too perfectly, all the little things he needed were too easy to find. He was meant to take this trip.

The forecast for the weekend was promising, and Thursday dawned bright and sunny. Surely that was a good sign, he reasoned.

He was hours out of the city, cruising farther away from the lights, and sky scrapers, and fumes. His old Ford proved worthy of the endeavor, snorting and rumbling down the highway like a charging ox. Eric let the peace of the drive take over: the wind through the window, the classic rock on the radio. Eventually the roads became less pristine-kept black tar and faded into something grey, potholed, and bumpy. Trees began to outnumber the houses and his cell gave him hassle for reception more than once. But all that was acceptable; it came with the territory of the territory, where nature reigned supreme. He'd been so long in the city it was hard to remember that there were still places where one could get lost from civilization.

Eric realized he was happy. Something deep and moving. Each mile was taking him farther away from the himself he'd become over the past month. And he liked that, and wondered why he had gone so long without missing it more.

It was coming up fast on eight o'clock and he was crooning to a static-infused version of AC/DC's "Shook Me All Night Long"; he couldn't tell if the static or his voice was a worse accompaniment for the classic. The world was transitioning slowly to night, and this the dreaded twilight hour. Eric popped another mini cookie in his mouth -a delicacy of his stop at the last Pump 'n Munch- and peered with dedicated intensity onto the winding road before him. Trees grew thick and close to the road, their green leaves looking almost black in the waning light. Eric flicked on his high beams to scatter the growing shadows.

It was most likely an extra burst from a distant radio tower that did it, but one moment Brian Johnson was singing about the earth quaking and his mind aching and the next, Mama Cass' haunting refrain was rolling loudly out his speakers like sad prayer:

_Stars fading but I linger on, dear, still craving your kiss…_

The sudden change made him jerk and his eyes left the road for only a second to flick the knob of the volume down. When he looked back, his headlights caught in full sight the form of a massive deer, proudly and immovably standing in the very center of the road.

Eric wrenched hard on the wheel. He swerved wildly but missed the creature by feet and dove the front of his Ford straight for the ditch, coming to a sudden, heavy, crunching stop against the bark of a stately pine.

His airbags didn't deploy but his seat belt kept him secure, and with only a minor case of whiplash. He clambered eventually, sluggishly, from the driver's seat, still shaken but mostly frustrated. When he glanced back onto the road, he noticed, with grim disappointment and no surprise, that the deer was gone. He didn't know what he would have done, would it have still been standing there -perhaps yell at it with great passion- but he was thankful at least that it wasn't embedded in his windshield, hooves kicking at his face.

He'd seen the effects one too many times and vowed never to befall the same fate.

His own wild response didn't look to have caused as much damage. Yet smoke was beginning to curl out from beneath the hood which meant he was surely out of his depth and whatever he'd done was beyond his mediocre talent to fix. Eric had no great desire to try it back to the road again and regrettably, he was left with no other choice. He would have to summon a tow.

A truck from the nearest town arrived a half an hour later thanks to the foresight he'd had to add roadside assistance to his car insurance the previous fall. It was dark by then, the sky a navy colored blanket on which a billion and more flickering stars were stitched. Eric was stretched out in the bed of his truck, not minding the swarms of mosquitoes much: he didn't get views like this from his apartment.

His tow-truck driver, a squat middle-aged man named Bob, was not overly full of conversation to as he winched up Eric's vehicle, neither did he transform into a Chatty Cathy on the entire ride back to the garage. But he was kind, despite the late hour, like most of the small-town people Eric had the good fortune of meeting thus far. Upon Eric's inquiry, Bob pointed a greasy finger toward a not-too-distant vacancy sign. His cell phone was firmly announcing that it could only be bothered for 'emergency calls' and so Eric thanked the man and told him he could be found at the motel, with any luck, in the morning for a full report on his truck.

The city sign had said "Four Lakes, pop. 882" when they'd passed it. And from the map he'd remembered to snag from the glove box, he figured he was yet a good 100 miles from the cabin.

And stranded. At least until the next day. Yet not without accommodations, a blessing about which he was very grateful.

The dainty bell over the door, and the inexplicable scent of real apple pie -not the fake air freshener type- gave Eric immediate relief that he would not be gutted and stuffed during his stay, like some Norman Bates nightmare. The relief continued as he was greeted not by a squirrel-y man but a young girl, about the age of ten, with eyes as blue as the summer sky and twice as wide.

Her golden curls flopped rebelliously into her face as she greeted him. "Reservation?" she chimed, definitely a pro.

"Um," said Eric, flustered, "I don't have one."

"Ok," said the little girl, as though it didn't matter either way to her. Yet she was gazing at him with such strength of focus, he couldn't help but feel absolutely at fault for not calling three months in advance. He felt like apologizing.

But the girl was already moving onward from the slight, tapping out something on a keyboard. Eric was quite in awe.

"Name," she demanded.

"Eric Huntsman," he answered and she typed, albeit, slowly, "with a 'c'."

She was halfway through copying his address when a voice preceded a woman through a saloon-type doorway behind the counter.

"Mikey, have you seen-" The woman, who looked an older version of her daughter except for the apron and the oven mitt -on which rested the apple pie he'd smelled- stopped short upon the sight of Eric. "Oh!" she exclaimed, composing herself with a quickness that said this sort of situation might have happened all the time. She nudged Mikey out of the way, handing off the mitt and the pie with a stern look that clearly indicated there was to be no tasting until she had dealt with this customer, and gave Eric a great apologetic smile.

"I'm sorry about that," she began, in a rush words and hand gestures, "I was in the kitchen, trying out a new recipe. Mikey- _Mikala_ was just watching the front for me. Very unprofessional, I am sure. Didn't mean to-" she had yet to take a breath and seemed suddenly to notice, halting her steam-engine train of words mid-sentence with a rush of red to her cheeks. "I'm sorry, Mr…" she glanced at the screen "Huntsman, was it?"

Eric nodded. "My truck…" he decided not to go into detail, "broke down. I just need a room for the night please." He handed over his photo id and credit card. The woman finished quickly and returned him his cards with a key.

"Number Five, Mr. Huntsman. And again, I'm very sorry."

Eric laughed. "No worries," he assured her. "That's a smart one you've got there; she's headed for great things. And quickly it seems." The woman shared his smile and bid him a pleasant evening, encouraging him to call if he needed anything.

Number Five at the Four Lakes Motel seemed to be the only one occupied for the evening, if the empty parking spaces were any indication. The key turned a little stiffly in the lock, as though it had been recently recut, and the door creaked when he opened it. But the room inside was clean, nice in fact, for the reputation of motels. Its décor definitely bore a woman's touch. He wondered absently if the woman and her daughter owned this place alone.

Eric paced a little in the room, unsure what he wanted to do with himself for the night. He tried to watch something on the television, but after flicking several times through the seven local channels offered, he shut it off. He tapped his fingers on the edge of the bed and contemplated chancing a shower. It was then he noticed the lingering quake in his hands, followed by the sudden growl of his stomach. Shock and an empty stomach never went well together. Cookies were the only food stuff he'd grabbed from the truck and weren't much of a meal at all. Eric grabbed the phone and hit the office button.

The line rang without answer. Eric slipped on his boots and shut the door to his room behind him, pocketing the key.

The office was void of woman or child but from somewhere beyond the door he could hear the mumble of a television. He didn't need to tap the bell on the counter and wouldn't have as he saw the time with a pang of instant regret; he turned to leave, search out answers on his own, but the bell above the door had already announced his arrival and the woman wasn't a few moments behind, the apron now gone.

"Sorry to bother you, ma'am," he said, "but I was wondering if there was a diner… or a fast food joint? I forgot to get supper," he finished lamely with a laugh.

She screwed down her pretty eyes in an apologetic frown as she ticked off a list of options, most of which were unavailable. "Rosie's is closed for the night and I'm afraid we haven't any fast food places as the 'economy of Four Lakes doesn't allow for the investment'. Lloyd's Bar is halfway across town but you wouldn't want to eat there anyway. You could try the gas station up the corner I suppose, or we do have a vending outside, although it's been a while since we've had a new shipment."

"Thanks," he said, "I think I'll head up the street. No offense to you and your vending machine of course."

The furrow in her brow evaporated with her smile. "Of course," she agreed good-naturedly.

It was well past eleven when he made it back to the motel. Eric didn't mind walking, nor the fresh air. The dark gave him pause however, and a few streetlamps flickered enough to make him hustle. It stood to reason that anything imagined from the dark would be no match for him -his size encouraged many to take a well-worth moment of reflection- but that didn't mean that a strange and almost-desolate place weren't able to play a little chaos on his already harried nerves. So he was glad to see the welcoming lights of the motel, illuminating the dark, drawing him in like a weary traveler.

His joy turned quickly to something quizzical as he noticed a small shape sitting outside Number Five. As he neared, the shape became clearly that of a clear Tupperware container. And inside, he saw, as he raised it to eye level, sat a perfect slice of apple pie with a healthy dollop of whipped cream on top. They'd even remembered to include a small fork. Eric could not contain his grin at this unexpected generosity.

The light from the office was now doused but he determined to say his thanks for the morning.

The deer and tree incident had set him back, admittedly. But after a shower, and a supper that consisted of a turkey sandwich, a bag of Cheetos, and the most delicious slice of homemade apple pie he'd ever tasted, Eric felt refreshed and renewed. He could worry tomorrow over his course of action.

He fell asleep that night somewhere between the hum of infomercials.

. . .

_Eric dreams, and in his dream he follows her._

_The forest is thick and the trees full. Trunks are circled with moss, and the earth is covered likewise in varied mounds where the sun breaks through the canopy of interwoven branches._

_Deep in the heart of this wild land, the air hangs thick and scented and alive with the possibility of enchantment. Each ray of sun is rippled by flitting things on silver wings, dancing dust-sized creatures. He feels things move in the underbrush, chirp and call to him from the boughs, hidden from his eyes; things that mean him no harm._

_He feels somehow as if he has walked forever, and yet knows he will never stop. She does not seem to have noticed him, or if she has, she does not turn to acknowledge him. But he follows her through the path of tight trees, never more than a step behind, as though he holds an unspoken fear of losing her -as though he knows he _cannot_ lose her. They reach the edge of a clearing into which she moves without hesitation, and he too, buoyed by her confidence._

_Yet there, in the small cutaway from the darkened forest, where an expanse of impossibly green grass grows under the uninhibited sun light, he finds she has gone; been spirited away in the matter of a moment. And in her place stands tall a white deer._

_Something presses in uncomfortably at his subconscious as he takes a timid step toward the magnificent creature, reaching with fingers unafraid toward the shimmering white coat. The deer turns its head toward him and he's met with brown eyes as gentle and ageless as the world. The something breaks into his dream then, triggered by a gaze as deep as a soul, rolling like a wave, covering everything in darkness._

_And suddenly he's sinking -drowning in a dark void: hands treading helplessly for life, lungs bursting for air…_

Eric woke with a gasp. His eyes flared open and his chest echoed loud with the sound of his beating heart. His fingers were white against the sheets he gripped.

The white deer. He'd seen it before.

The hours-old memory sputtered to life in his mind: a quick flash of a head light glare and the sound of tires squealing against pavement. It had been there, that very deer, standing solidly in the center of his path like a warm-blooded roadblock.

Like an undeniable omen.

. . .

The night passed in a fit of restless sleep. His mind turned like a freshly-wound pocket watch, moving steadily in circles of cogs and wheels of speculation and an indefinite worry. He dreamed no more of the girl or the deer, yet the image of both lingered with him through every hour. A knock on his door came and went from his notice sometime after dawn and he woke finally, with a grunt, at the sound of his air conditioner kicking on with an unearthly cough and rattle.

A glance at his wrist watch told him it was just after nine am.

Eric ran a hand over his face, scrubbing at the deep grooves of his exhaustion. There was an ache in his bones, and a fog that clouded his head as he sat up. He considered, with a sort of defiant scowl, the sunlight streaming in from the wide window he'd forgotten to curtain the night before. He rose from the mattress and crossed to the window, taking in a view of the town that seemed somewhat the same, only crisper now in the daylight, and with slightly improved traffic.

Eric dressed quickly and munched on a few straggler Cheetos left over from his supper. He had things to do this morning, and last night's dream had left him anxious to put this town behind him. As he stepped outside his door however, he wished immediately that he hadn't.

It had dawned a proper Midwest summer day, right down to the stifling humidity that almost immediately turned his clothes into a sweat bag. No breeze moved the trees. Eric scowled. Sleeplessness was easily tolerated. But he was beyond something so simple. There was a frustration, and an aggravation, and all together, stewed in a mugginess the day already boasted so early, he ran the risk of turning into a right bear.

Eric figured he'd better get his tenderheartedness out of him quickly before he was incapable of thankfulness and headed to the motel office.

The office was cool, and it refreshed his moment of undue anxiety. The woman -he regretted never catching her name- was gone again, but as she seemed apt to do, her daughter remained behind, perched on a chair in the corner, scribbling furiously into a drawing pad. She looked up upon his entering and then immediately back to her drawing. There was no malice in her ten-year-old dismissal, only a very specific scale of value: her coloring took the foremost slot of importance.

She however graced him with information, as though the look on his face had said it before his mouth could, "Mom's gone out," she informed him in a 'good morning' sort of tone, "but you have a message." She pointed with the flattened end of her crayon to the registration counter. "Up there."

A slip of paper bore his name and room number. Under it, in a flourished yet legible script it read that the garage had called, and that his truck was ready.

This inflated Eric's spirits immensely. "Thanks," he said happily to Mikey, adding that he would be back later, before stepping out again into the heat.

Bob, Eric learned, apparently owned the tow truck and the garage, with it's attached gas station, but did not do any mechanical work on the vehicles. That was done by an incredibly competent-looking youth named Charlie, whose grin was so deeply lined in grease and oil Eric didn't wonder if the boy lived under an auto lift.

"Your radiator got bumped a little," he explained over the open engine of Eric's truck. "Could have been worse, if you'd had a newer car. But this baby's a beast," he said, patting the steel frame. Eric liked hearing his treasured truck spoken about with such fondness; he liked not being the only one who saw the value of the craftsmanship of years past. "Of course," Charlie continued, with a pained grimace, "she's gonna stay with this bend in her front grille for a while, unless you feel like hauling her up to a big city garage for a week or so." No, Eric did not.

He shook his head. "It's alright," he admitted and likewise felt after seeing it in a fresh morning light, "she looks good with a few battle scars."

Charlie's laugh said he agreed wholeheartedly. Eric thanked the man profusely for his efficient work and paid the bill.

He drove back to the motel and found the owner wrestling a few boxes into her trunk of her station wagon. Eric cut the engine and jumped out to help her, taking a large box from her hands with a smile.

"Just some things for the Goodwill," she explained, shutting her trunk and wiping the back of her hand across her perspiring forehead.

Eric extended his hand. "I wanted to thank you for the pie," he said. "It was really too kind."

"It was nothing," she downplayed the act of generosity. "I felt bad for not having something for you here. And Mikey insisted we share." Eric cast a glance toward the office window but glimpsed no sight of the child.

"Well, tell her thank you for me?"

"Will do," she promised. "You got the message I see?" She inclined her head toward the vehicle. "Charlie knows what he's doing; we're lucky to have him around town."

Eric nodded. "Yeah, she's running like a top now," he agreed with pride. "I owe you anything more?"

The woman shook her head, a few tendrils of blonde hair falling from her tight ponytail in the clammy air. "We're squared," she said, "You just have a safe drive, Eric."

"I will, Mrs..."

"Anna," she filled in helpfully.

"Thanks again, Anna."

Eric changed his shirt and gathered his things and was heading to the office to return the key to his room when the girl with the blonde curls stepped out in front of him. The door to Number One was open, and it was obvious she'd been occupying it, watching television from the sound. In her hand she held a folded piece of paper and her face was an unreadable canvas.

"I drew this," she explained, her voice suddenly timid and almost nervous. A different demeanor outlined the traces of her young face, turning the circles of her eyes and the tilt of her small mouth into something almost fearful. "Its you," she added.

Eric took the paper, unfolding it gently in his large hands. There was talent on the page, but yet raw and incomplete. She had drawn a landscape, twisted and muddy brown; desolate. In the center of the dull-colored world stood Eric, drawn all in red, like a burning man. He was somewhere between a stick figure and a real rendering, and his face bore the most detail. It struck him oddly that she would have copied him with longer hair, a style he hadn't worn in ages. In the picture it was tucked behind his ears and tied, like he used to in years past. He dismissed the small voice of apprehension and thanked her. It was a lovely gesture, and a nice picture nonetheless.

Mikey only looked at him, with wide eyes full of something that strongly resembled sadness. "Red," she said, her voice a silent cadence, "for remembrance."

And then she was gone, and the door to Number One shut soundly.

Eric tucked the picture into his wallet and returned the key and Tupperware to Anna, keeping his interaction with her daughter to himself. He climbed into the cab of his truck and gunned the engine down the main road, back to the old highway, putting the image of the strange drawing from Mikey, and the town of Four Lakes, to his back and from his mind.


	3. Chapter 3

_Notes and Acknowledgements: _I am supposed to be doing chores, but this wouldn't leave me alone. I feel the last chapter wasn't quite enough of what I wanted -although I will divulge that it does have importance- and so I started on this and didn't stop. And let me also say I am proud of myself: those who've been familiar with my other works know that I am a one-shot writer. Well, ha, I guess a little bird of suggestion can move mountains *winkwink* And ok, the last chapter featured music, this one features a line from a well-known poem of Robert Louis Stevenson. Just felt the need to disclaim... in case anyone for a moment believed I came up with AC/DC and such all my myself.

* * *

_**I'm here again**_

_** A broken mess, just scattered pieces of who I am**_  
_** I tried so hard**_  
_** Thought I could do this on my own**_  
_** I've lost so much along the way**_

Something was wrong. Or not wrong, just not right. Maybe he had expected too much from this trip, or rushed too quickly into it. Eric was not a brash man, he made decisions and plans; he rarely jumped into a situation without thinking it through.

But he'd become all turned about. His rudder turned circles in a listless sea; his mind was a mess.

He thought he could run from everything, or at least hide, if only for a weekend. Ha! As if some trip down memory lane would serve him any better than whatever charade he'd been playing. Over the years, he'd been steadily, dedicatedly, paving over the old dirt roads of his life once lived, and the losses that had punctuated his cowardly existence.

But perhaps, this was all only the beer talking.

Eric looked contemptuously at the nearly empty case of alcohol.

_Do you drink to drown your sadness, or your shame, Eric?_

His mother had asked him that, on the last day he'd seen her. He grit his teeth at the sound of her voice in his head. She was a hard, stubborn woman, and perhaps that was where he'd gotten the small streak of his own. But she was bitter and angry in her years after his father's death, something that Eric thought he could never be. Even now, as a fine sheen of the very same bitterness seemed to settle over his own shoulders, it felt still foreign and beyond his capability. Yet unshakeable.

He felt an anger and a sadness well up inside him and he washed it down with a final swallow of hearty brew, crumbling the can easily in his large palm.

When had he become this way?

His father had built the cabin on the lake years before Eric had been born. He'd sought out the plot of land and poured his entire savings into it, commissioning a cabin to his own design to be erected. When Eric came into the world, it had been a bright, peaceful getaway for the family, far from the city and it's problems. Yet, the blissful vacations lasted only a short time. Eric's father grew ill one wet spring and was buried beneath the earth by fall.

His mother never fully recovered. And in his own way, neither did Eric.

She'd tried to sell the cabin but a will prevented her; Eric's father knew his wife and the irrational grudges she held too well. It would be rented out, stated his father posthumously, and therefore to aid the family he left behind, in whatever small ways it could. Eric's mother despised the idea and the memory of the cabin and neither she nor Eric ever visited it again.

With her death, many estranged years later, the cabin passed to Eric and became all but forgotten as he built a life from the ashes of his childhood in the big city and attempted to escape the _lostness_ that had lingered over him his whole life.

Sarah had helped with that.

His chest tightened. She too was gone, and as Eric sat at the table his father had crafted, he felt all he had overcome threaten to overwhelm him again.

The caretaker of the land had left the key under the doormat and the instant Eric entered he felt that expectant peace suddenly snipped from him like a helium balloon.

This was wrong. He was wrong. There was no destiny in this old home, not even an embrace of compassion in it's worn walls. He shouldn't have come back.

The sky was turning a hazy orange-red, like a fierce fire on the horizon. Eric stood at the front window, letting the color wash over him and fill the cabin; watching the way it turned the lake into a shimmering reflection of the flames. Tears came into his eyes as the beer ate hot holes in his empty stomach.

He looked to his phone upon the table, his eyes lingering longingly over the thin case as inside him waged a violent battle. He desperately wanted to call her then, his Sarah. She'd left him, but that didn't matter; if only he could hear her voice. Just to talk to her, have her coddle his misery and then shush it away. She'd done it before, and she could again.

He lifted his phone in his moment of weakness but the damned thing denied him cruelly. Among the trees, far from any civilization he readily remembered, he was without service. With a anger unlike him, he threw his phone across the room, satisfied as he heard it hit the wall and then the floor with a plastic crunch.

Eric popped the top of another beer can and drug deeply from the bitter liquid. The room was almost completely painted in shadows then, the last burst of fiery sun lingering like a haze on the horizon. He'd forgotten where the light switch was, or even to turn on the generator, and so when the world went dark, he remained at the window, sipping at his pain.

He was alone here. Four walls, misery, and another case of beer in the bed of his truck. The silence became to creep in on him when suddenly he laughed. His loud mirth echoed like a thunderclap off the empty walls.

"A fine blubbering mess you've gotten yourself into, Eric," he chided himself in the dark.

Nothing answered him back.

It was too late now for fishing, unless he desired to get lost among the endless connecting lakes, only to be found weeks later, his corpse washed up on some rocky beach. And he had likewise no hope for finding and starting the generator in his current state. So Eric unrolled his bed roll right there beside the kitchen table and jimmied some fresh batteries into his old transistor. The tunes crackled through from some local channel, a station of country and rock, and Eric relaxed on the hardwood cut from the woods around him.

The shadows were quiet around him but his mind continued onward, only seeming to fade with each subsequent beer. Again and again he heard his mother, lingering like a record on repeat, He saw with perfect clarity the cut of contempt to her worn face.

_Sadness or shame, Eric?_

"For both, Mom," he said, lifting his can into the air like a toast. "Both."

. . .

**_You call my name.  
I come to you in pieces._**

The wind had perhaps pushed the door open, or maybe some stray animal. Either way, it could have been very likely that he'd forgotten to lock it, even though he was sure he remembered doing so.

He heard the footfall and a rustle of fabric, the whisper of a smile widened. It woke him and he sat up, knocking over the radio and a few cans as he did. Quite the ruckus. His mind was sluggish and his body also, as though mired in a fog. Of ale, appropriately. As the sleep was pushed from his eyes and his sight came into focus, he knew it was _her_ that had opened the door. The girl who resided in his dreams, although now as real as anything, for she stood beneath the arch of the door.

His heart thumped wildly in his chest. He was not dreaming. This couldn't be a dream. It was too real, more real than everything else -more even than the sharp pains of sadness he'd been tortured with only hours ago.

She looked at him from the doorway, her white dress moving softly in the breeze, her hair tangling across her face. She looked at him and she smiled something soft, her kind wide eyes filling him with a sweet peace.

_Come_, the gesture of her outstretched hand said; her hand, paler than snow in the shining moonlight. He rose from the floor, stiff and labored, and moved to her side.

He towered above her in the doorway, desperate to believe in the realness of her. Her hand was warm in his own and the touch of her lips -the ones he remembered kissing in his previous dreams- felt real and soft beneath his weathered thumb. She did not seem to mind him overlooking her with such intimate familiarity. In fact, her every demeanor seemed instead to welcome it. As though she wanted him to know she was truly there before him.

Eric knotted a handful of her hair in his fist and kissed her then, the urge driving him with a recklessness to which he was unaccustomed. She bent into his kiss, and pressed softly against him when he pulled her close, his arms going around her small waist. The taste of her quickened something old and forgotten from the corners of his mind, or a mind long ago, something a part of him and yet not. It was a strange wondrous feeling she gave him -the feeling he'd been desiring of a lesser thing: the trip of hopefulness that disappointed him in the end. This: the touch of her skin, and the feel of her mouth upon his, was the peace and renewal for which he'd been searching.

He wanted to ask her how it was possible. Where had she come from, and how had she been haunting his dreams. But he could not bring his tongue to pose the questions, to bring understanding to this moment of rapture. He only wanted to feel.

He broke his lips from hers in a rumble of contentment and let her lead him from the cabin and across the soft grass to the lake's edge. The water shimmered in the light of the moon, casting the ripples into a sight of a thousand diamonds. She laughed as she dipped her feet in, and began to wade out, turning her body to beckon him as she moved further into the still water.

He followed her _always he had followed, and always he would_ and tossed his shirt onto the sandy expanse before wading in after her. The water was past her hips, and rising still past her chest. She bobbed against the crest of the lake, her white dress clinging to her in ways that made him avert his eyes.

She beckoned him, calling his name in a voice he heard only in his mind. He moved against the heavy water, swiftly, steadily, but he seemed to never move any closer to her. She remained beyond his reach.

He was feet from her, close like ever before but never growing closer still, when she paused. And in the moonlight he saw the bright look of her face turn to something of infinite sorrow. Her pale skin seemed to chip, like a china doll, with a terrible blow of grief.

"Home is the sailor, home from the sea," she recited, her lonely eyes looking to him, beyond him, through him almost. "Home," she said, "but too late."

"I'm coming," Eric shouted, fear pushing up into his limbs that stroked powerfully across the water. He was almost to her, with another dive he'd be at her side, wrapping his arm around her, dragging her close.

"You will never save me," she said, her voice a mournful cry, and then she slipped beneath the dark water.

Eric came upon the spot where she'd disappeared, panic throbbing hurtfully in his chest. He dived into the lake, straining his eyes against the blackness but to no avail. He broke the surface again, gasping, his eyes burning.

Her name came to his lips from a place of memory, never known yet long forgotten. It reached up from that old and broken place inside him -infinitely more aged than the years of his life, coming, it seemed from a place beyond reckoning- and grabbed hold of his tongue and lips, crying out to the heavens of his world and every other.

"Snow!" He cried aloud, floundering upon the surface, murky water rushing into his mouth. "Snow!"

Eric woke abruptly, knocking over the radio and empty beer cans with a wild swing of his arms. The world was bathed in shadow and not water; the door to the cabin stared back at his frantic eyes, shut and locked.

A dream. It had only been a dream.

A terrifying panic renewed itself in his chest. He was just drunk, or maybe crazy. Maybe both. But probably just crazy, slowly succumbing to the very insanity that had taken his mother -dreaming of lost moments, and people who didn't exist.

And yet.

_Snow._

A dream perhaps, but he felt her still, impossibly so. She lingered at the ends of his fingers, and on the corner of his mouth.

_Snow!_

It hit him like a kick to the chest. He was up, scrambling frantically, drunkenly, for a flashlight. When the search proved fruitless he fell to his hands and knees, feeling out the darkness for his phone, hoping and wishing he hadn't ruined it for good. He cursed as he searched, his heart lodged solidly in his throat, making the cry sound strangled and broken. And then his fingers nudged a familiar shape and he grasped the thing, flipping the case open immediately to be illuminated with its soft backlight. Eric could have cheered. It wasn't a flashlight but it would do.

He ran through the cabin, down the hall and up a flight of recently-carpeted stairs. To the room he used to call his own. Prayers were rent from his lips, expelled by gasps from his heaving lungs as he went. He hoped the bed was still there.

His father had built it for him, a bunk bed. And it implied a certain hopefulness that was never made manifest. Eric had enjoyed them as a child, swinging from one to the other, claiming a different bed each night as whimsy would determine. He'd spent hours of his youthful weekends in that room, transforming the beds into any number of fantastic fortresses. He only hoped they hadn't been torn down in the years.

He burst through the door and elation engulfed him. The beds remained, constructed into the wall of the cabin.

Eric rushed to the beds, clambering over them as best as his large frame could manage. It was much easier when he was five… _and just learning how to write, and be mischievous with sharp objects in the dark. _He searched the walls of the top bunk first, and then felt along the mattress box. No indentations kissed his fingers.

With a roar of frustration, he squeezed below the top bunk, running his light over the underside. Looking -madly, furiously, looking.

He remembered the name, shook loose from years of forgotten and buried memories. It stood out at him, blazing bright and luminous in his mind as an image at the tip of a pocket knife he'd nicked from his father, embedding the word into the wood of his bed. She was something of his dreams, or something of his imagining, and now, something beyond his precise remembrance. But that would come later, if only he could find…

His light hit it and he froze, though ever fiber in his being felt electrified, throbbing his nerves against his flesh. It was carved into the underside of the bed with a child's skill. Big letters, misshapen, and tilted: but true nonetheless.

_Snow._

No, not just a word. _Her_ name.


	4. Chapter 4

_Big Thanks and Apologies: _First off, thank you to everyone who read and reviewed this story thus far. For taking the chance, and enjoying the journey. I've been absent and I apologize. Its been a hectic, what, months here and I haven't had a moment to even log on to my computer, much less pen a well thought out, understandable chapter or two. I'll admit I had a little trouble delving back in, but this story has a mind of it's own and it gets done well enough when I give it room to finally breath outside of a trapped file heading. Anyway, onward, as they say. Hope you enjoy this short one; I'll try to update sooner next time.

* * *

Night came. And with it, a storm across the horizon. The sky poured rain upon the earth below, filling the lakes and muddying the soil. The wind snapped and lightning cut jagged white lines across the air. It was a sudden, violent storm that seemed to shake world. Each beat of thunder sounded like an ageless animal, roaring, bending the cage of the clouds and sky for freedom.

Through all this Eric slept, although restless. Tucked into the bed of his youth, like an over-sized child in the lap of an estranged parent. His fingers rested on the word he'd carved many years ago, hoping as he drifted away in a haze of alcohol and yearning, that it would shake loose some more definitive memory. Nothing came forth as his eyelids pressed together but blackness, sweet and engulfing.

Dreams did come to him in his fitful expanses of respite, but not of her. In his dreams he found himself among the empty pews of funeral homes, alone with an open casket that lingered just out of sight. He would run to it, never quite reaching it -not even sure if he wanted to. The dream repeated itself, each doorway out of the room lead back into it. He was alone, save for one moment when his mother appeared. She gripped his hand tightly in hers and, looking down at him with a face set of stone, demanded he wipe the tears from his cheeks.

When dawn broke, the humidity of the day before broke as well. A breeze ran that across the lake and the world -though still wet and soggy from the night before- seemed refreshing. Eric's sleep had not been. He woke to the after effects of his copious intake and wished he was dead. There was a stiffness in his neck and joints and his shin was bruised and scabbed with old blood from an injury he hadn't realized he'd sustained in his night's mad-scramble quest.

And where now did that quest lead him?

Eric sat up awkwardly, holding his head as though it might fall off. He ached and everything felt too tight, too bright, too loud. Even his own thoughts, rolling around and around in his head, coming to no conclusion, coming back only to the carving in the bed side. Eric's fingers brushed it anxiously, like a tick, like a child grabbing for a security blanket. Only this, in the clear morning light, he realized the fear of it all. There was so much to question, so much to wonder. So much to disbelieve.

Eric stood up -much too fast. He reeled to the left and caught himself on the edge of the desk against the wall. He felt sick and ill and completely at the will of chaos.

He needed air.

Eric barreled through the cabin and out the front door. He inhaled deeply, taking in the fresh scent of rain-washed earth, the sharp pine, the sound of the water rippling in the dawning sun. He shut his eyes and let the quiet world comfort him, bathe his aching mind.

Eric stood for a long while, leaning forward onto the deck railing, his hands gripping tightly onto the chapped wood. He gathered himself, all the fragments that the night had left stranded. Finally he opened his eyes, running a hand across his face, grimacing as his palm scraped uncomfortably over his unshaven jaw. He would have to attend to that…

Something glinted in the sunlight. A ways off, down the length of the tree covered drive. Eric narrowed his eyes, but even as he peered, the shimmer of reflecting sunlight shook and disappeared. It was odd, in a way that scratched namelessly at the back of his mind, but the discomfort was forgotten in the next moment as his ears detected a ringing from somewhere deep inside the cabin.

_His phone!_

Tucked in the mattress of the bed he found it. Eric flipped open the cover, surprised to find he had two missed calls. He was surprised even more by the caller.

Eric pressed the call button and waited two long rings for the line to pick up, a smile coming unconsciously to his face.

"I know, I know," Eric started quickly before the other had the chance to berate him first, "I should have called you."

"Damn right you should have," barked Uncle John, mirth stitching the undercurrent of his gruff tone. "My favorite nephew is finally come up to the cabin and I have to find out from George. George!"

Eric laughed. "I'm you're only nephew, Uncle John, and I'm sorry. I should have let you know first thing."

Uncle John wasn't to be put off so easily. His longstanding dissention with George, the caretaker, was not to go without a retelling of this latest injustice. "He was just grinning like some snake that just ate a great big frog. Like he had this big secret. So infuriating. I just wanted him to spit it out and he's standing on my doorstep, twirling that damn cane and telling me someone's come up to get the key to the cabin and who do I suppose it was? Oh, he'll never let me hear the end of it now, me, not knowing my only nephew was in town."

Eric hid his chuckle. "I'm sorry Uncle John, really I am."

John seemed satisfied. "Well you should be, keeping me in the dark like this, like I'm some old nobody."

"It was a spur of the moment decision," Eric explained. "I didn't even have service most of the way."

"Damn cell phones," John said plainly, giving his entire opinion on the whole lot of such devices, and then got straight to business, like always. "Come over," he said, in the tone that implied there was no other alternative, "I'll put a pot on."

Eric's stomach grumbled suddenly and fierce. "Give me twenty minutes."

. . .

Muddy track and one wrong turn turned twenty minutes into forty but the wait didn't put a crack in the smile stretched across Uncle John's face. He'd aged some since Eric had seem him last but he wore it well, although not as well as the handmade brown sweater vest on which someone had badly knitted green fish. Eric shared a strong hug and then questioned the minor atrocity.

Uncle John laughed. "Betty, down at the license center. She's got a bit of a crush on me maybe."

Uncle John was a religious bachelor. Eric remembered him saying once it worked out alright because his great love in life was fishing anyway. And that didn't seem to have changed at all in the years Eric had been away. It was a fisherman's home John occupied, just out of the heart of town. And if general belief wasn't enough, the décor of the house was certain to dissuade any bright thoughts to the contrary. At a fold out table in a sort of dining room lined with mounted fish and fishing trophies, Eric and his uncle took coffee and munched on day-old donuts.

"I'm surprised to see here, Eric. Last place I thought you'd head to." Uncle John had never been one to mince words; he came straight out with whatever was on his mind. Eric's mother, John's sister, had been like that as well, only where her words were sharp, John's were infinitely soft.

Eric smiled despite the humorless atmosphere. "Needed a little peace, I suppose," he said, thinking back to how long that moment on the dark pavement seemed. How dreamlike. How untrue.

Eric shook his head and took another swallow of hot coffee, feeling the heat warm his stomach and limbs.

"Peace?" John echoed, incredulous. "Now I don't know what to make of you, Eric. Never would have thought I'd hear you speak so highly of my little lakes."

Eric laughed then. "Aw, they're not so bad," he consented.

"You go out on the lake then? Throw in a line? Tempt the water life?" Uncle John couldn't help that glimmer in his eyes, it was innate. There from the beginning of the world perhaps.

The thought of the lakeside sprung up in Eric's mind. And with it the memory of her, floating out among the dark waves, slipping under. His chest tightened. He felt suddenly an urgency come upon him and he leaned forward on the table quickly.

"Uncle John, you remember my summers here, when I was a kid?"

John seemed a little taken aback by Eric's quick tone and the seriousness that filled his eyes. "Of course I do. I took you out on the water every single day. You weren't the best of fisherman, but A for Effort… ha! I remember the time you got the hook caught in your-" Eric cut him off, waving away whatever trip down memory lane his uncle was going to take with an apology.

"I'm sorry Uncle John, but this is important. I need to know something. I think that's why I came up here. I didn't know it then, but I think I know it now." It was coming together in Eric's head as the words fell from his mouth, rushed and breathless. The idea certainly fit, in a strange impossible way. And maybe it was crazy, but it was all he had to go on.

John nodded, staying silent.

"Do you remember me ever talking about a girl-" as if on cue, another image of _her_ flashed behind his eyes, lovely, fragile "-a beautiful girl? Black hair and pale skin. She was-" he decided to smudge the truth a bit "-imaginary. I think I used to call her Snow."

John remained silent but he looked like he was thinking, and hard. After what seemed an eternity, he lit up like a bulb.

"I remember one weekend. It rained so hard we couldn't even see out the windows. I stayed with your dad and you at the cabin, hating the weather and the world. You were off in your room and your dad and I were having a few, talking about everything when there was this crash, this almighty bang. I swear it shook the house, but maybe that's memory for you. It came right from your room anyway, you know the one with the bunks your dad built, and we thought for sure a tree had just come down in the storm. So we rushed in there and," he paused to laugh, "you'd knocked down the wardrobe. I don't know how you did it, but there it was, smashed to the floor, all eight feet of it. And you, you must have been five or six, were standing on top of it, like a victorious warrior, stabbing it's wooden back with some stick you'd taken and sharpened.

You're dad might have been upset a little, I don't remember. It was an expensive piece of furniture. I just thought it was hilarious. Little guy like you, taking down a waredrobe you swore up and down was a mighty troll. And, that's it, that's why I remember that name. You told me you had to kill the troll and save the princess. 'Save Snow,' you said."

_Save Snow._ The words hit him like a Mack truck. Eric felt the room close in. He couldn't remember how to breath. _Save me, she'd said. Save me, she'd always said._

His uncle was still talking. Eric's hearing swung back in to catch only the last sentence: "...think she was imaginary though."

"What did you say?"

"I don't think she was imaginary," John said again.

Eric felt his body go numb, expectant and fearful. "Why not?" His words croaked out, his throat painfully dry.

Concern tainted the wrinkled corners of John's eyes, but he kept those words at bay. "You drew pictures and told stories. All about her I think. It worried your mom. She said there was a girl who lived on your street. A little girl that you seemed quite attached to. She didn't like it, all the fanciful attraction at your age. I told her it was normal. She was too uptight, your mom, bless her soul. Anyway, I don't remember the girls real name but she said you called her Snow. Your Snow."

. . .

The rest of the visit was carried along on the backs of small talk and catching up. Eric tried to put his heart into the conversation, but it was elsewhere, miles and years back, holding on to fragments of memory too real to be imagined. If John suspected his faraway thoughts, he didn't ask for them to be elaborated. Sudden questioning aside, the subject was not broached again until Eric was sliding behind the wheel of his truck, hours later.

John had his hand on the door frame, a weathered and worried look climbing into the lines of his face.

"I hope you find what you're looking for, Eric," he said. "And I hope it doesn't disappoint you."

Eric backed out of the drive and swung onto the road that would lead him back to the cabin.

"Me too," he whispered to the road and the future before him. "Me too."

. . .

It was nearly dark as Eric approached the turn off for his cabin. He would leave tonight, he'd decided, while his belief in her realness was still hot in his bones. He'd already called George and told him that he'd leave the key under the doormat. Eric just needed to grab his things and he'd be off, pushing towards the city, and his old home.

In the waning light he caught the reflection from his rear view mirror. It was the same car from the morning, he knew it immediately, unmistakably. Only this time it was following him, and had been for the last ten minutes.

Eric should have realized earlier; it's stark lines where no fit for the rural country side. The windows were tinted, far too dark too see through the distance. He could be wrong, the car just another like him on the quiet road. But something about it seemed odd, off-putting. His turn came up quickly and Eric braked, hard. The black car swerved to the right to miss colliding with his tailgate. It corrected awkwardly, indecisive for a mere second of pausing or continuing on, and then accelerated to go around Eric's stopped vehicle. As it passed, he peered without reserve into their windows, but all he caught was outline and shadow and the tap of a burning cigarette out the driver's window, ash flying to the ground.

As the black car sped out of sight, Eric felt a stab of shame. It was probably nothing. He was simply overreacting, just on edge. And still, something about that car and it's driver sat wrongly with him. Like a strange sort of déjà vu. That feeling caught up in his throat like he'd been through all this before, and it hadn't ended well. Try as he might, Eric couldn't shake the illusion that had settled over him. Even as his thoughts turned to Snow, trying to remember more about her, the real her he must have known as a child, it lingered at the back of his mind as he drove. Turning his hopes bittersweet.

Day faded into night, and the roads stretched on into blackness and unknown.


	5. Chapter 5

_Notes and Such:_ Inspiration strikes, right in the middle of my Doctor Who marathon. Oh well, words wait for no man. Get up to grab a slice of pizza and if you don't keep a notebook handy, you're ruined for the want of food. Life lessons... or perhaps just a poor soul's ramblings. I claim the latter and apologize for bothering you with them. Onward I suppose. I offer this in penance for the last. Don't worry, it's getting somewhere... :/

* * *

Eric's truck rumbled down the highway with purpose. Of singular thought and steady hand he rushed toward truth or her: perhaps both, if there was a difference anymore.

His mind was not as steady, and like tires against the black tar, they raced down a thousand roadways of thought. Yet, at the center of every spinning reality and dream and fear was a desperate hope on which all others hung: Snow was real. The rest didn't matter, or didn't matter much, not in the realm of all that the possibility suggested. He held on to it, like nothing else. Snow was real. It had to be true. _She_ had to be true. Eric would accept no alternative.

A pesky truth slipped in to darken the water: why then did she haunt his dreams?

Eric ran a hand across his face and to the tight muscles bunching at the back of his neck.

He was at fault. He knew it. Somewhere in the grand scope of his tragedies this had become his greatest. He'd lost her. He'd forgotten to remember her. And so she haunted him. Images from a guilty soul. Memories or made up delusions, each one ending the same: to find her, to save her.

Perhaps it was too late now. Twenty years was more lost time than any man could hope to rectify. Lost years. But she was important enough to try, he could feel that: digging into his chest like a sword tip, pricking his skin and muscle and bone to _inside_. She was desperately terribly wonderfully important, like air to a drowning man. But what if this mad rush to remember her and find her and save her was nothing more than a floundering attempt by an obsessive man to atone…

A look in the rearview mirror drew into focus the grim possibility. His disarray frowned back at him, as did his certain homage to gruff and rugged mountain men. How did his uncle recognize him? Eric barely recognized himself.

Drawn momentarily from his cycling thoughts, Eric pulled into a truck stop. Trivial things still mattered. He clambered out of the truck, pausing to stretch his cramped legs. He couldn't quite remember when he'd left the cabin or if he'd stopped along the way. Eric reached into the truck bed and dug through his duffle. He'd left it in the bed overnight and the rain had done its damage. The dampest of the clothes were piled at the top and sloshed at the bottom; they were beginning to smell. From somewhere in-between he found a shirt that was mostly dry and relatively clean-smelling. He grabbed it and his shaving kit and headed into the diner adjacent to the convenience store.

Places such as Marge's Diner existed all over the Midwest. Little places tucked along almost-deserted roadways, and clinging helplessly to the apron-strings of the brave souls who manned the griddle from dawn to dusk and all times in between. They were the last and hopeful refuge of the travelers of the roads, those likewise displaced men and their big rigs of merchandise of food and fuel, looking for somewhere that reminded them of home while they are so far from it. Eric felt welcome the moment he entered the door… _and hungry_. Apparently he'd forgotten breakfast, and perhaps, dinner.

Marge's smelled like grease and smoke and unpolished leather. Pointed to the bathroom by a woman who bore no nametag -but could be no other than Marge herself- Eric decided that hunger or no, he would eat his meal looking more man than beast. A shave and clean shirt did wonders for the look of him. He felt renewed somehow, giddy even. Which was a little ridiculous.

Seated at a cracked leather booth, Eric looked long and hard at the menu before ordering the Cook's Special: eggs, bacon, hash browns, griddle cakes, and a "bottomless cup" of coffee. A glance at the clock told him it was late, later than it looked by the lingering sun; too late for breakfast, but he was not denied his whim.

Around him, conversation from the sparse customers was dulled and hushed. Somewhere, perhaps in the kitchen, a radio hummed a sad country song. It was calm inside the diner, something peaceful and lulling. So different from the road on which Eric felt he'd been on constantly these past days, a journey without end. Both in mind and body. He waited for his food and thought hopefully and without conscious effort to what lay ahead of him, what could only wait ahead.

Eric smelled the fire moments before he saw the flames. The scent of something burning, something greater than an over-cooked burger or a doused match, reached his nose and turned his stomach. In the next instant there erupted flames, larger than a man, bursting out from the order window. They lapped out like hungry tongues and crawled up the walls, rushing over everything as though it was doused in kerosene. Eric scrambled from the booth with a shout and made a start for the patrons at the end of the counter. He was halfway to them when they disappeared in red-orange fire. Their screams clawed at his ears. Eric whirled, tossing up an arm to the roaring blaze, searching through the growing smoke for Marge or the cooks.

Nothing. He heard only the screams of the dying, the sputter of swift destruction, and the rush of the flames.

Smoke rolled into the room, engulfing and black. Eric dropped to his knees and crawled for the door, coughing as his lungs burned and blackened. He could barely see. His eyes watered and stung; his limbs felt like dead weight. The fire crackled and laughed above him, sounding almost like a man. He tried to hold his breath as air became fumes. He was almost to the door, there was ash in his mouth, he could almost see the light…

Marge placed his breakfast on the table, jolting Eric straight out of his seat. His breath came frantic into empty lungs. His face was wet with sweat; his collar was damp. The terror of the moment still clung to him in the whiteness of his face. His limbs shook. Marge looked at him with an expression of mild concern.

"Sorry I scared you, hun," cracked a voice born on tobacco. She returned to the kitchen through swinging doors.

Eric stood next to his booth, his fingers gripping the edge of the table. White knuckles. He was aware that people were staring. Eric sat down awkwardly, without meeting any of the queer gazes. Surely their hushed tones were now focused on his behavior. How strange it must have seemed to them, his frantic awakening.

But had he been asleep? It had only been minutes, seconds maybe. He couldn't have dozed off. He didn't even remember his eyes shutting or a feeling of drowsiness. And it had felt so… real. Eric looked around the diner, his eyes careful and afraid. No roaring flames, not even the hint of smoke. Had it all been in his head? He could almost taste still the ash gritting in his teeth, choking his airways.

Eric observed his food with disinterest. His stomach grumbled and ached but he had no desire to eat. He felt sick, suddenly, completely.

For ten long minutes Eric pushed at his food. He ate little. Finally he walked to the cash register, placed down a few bills and left the diner with a half-hearted thank you.

Halfway out to his truck, something caught the corner of his eye. It was the sleek black car, glinting the setting sun. Something dark and heavy landed in the pit of his stomach and filled him with an unspeakable dread. It couldn't be…

Dread turned to ire, an anger unlike him. His fists clenched at his sides and he walked toward the waiting car at the edge of the station. If it had caught sight of his coming, it made no move to leave. No twitch of life behind the darkened windows. _It could be nothing_, said his rationality. _It could be everything, _his fury argued back.

A semi-truck passed him, moving with a rumble and ease between the space that divided Eric and the black car. It was the same that had been there at the cabin, and followed him after his visit to his uncle. That had to mean something. He needed to know what.

The semi drove past and Eric took a firm step and then stopped. The car was gone. Not even a swirl of dust or the a line of tire trackes were left to say it had ever been.

For a moment, Eric froze. For a moment, he felt very lost.

Eric stepped into the cab of his truck and rested his hand upon the key a long while before turning over the engine. Something was playing at him, playing _with_ him. His mind, or something else. Toying with his reality, making it something it wasn't or couldn't be. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought, adrift. Terrified.

Eric drove as far as the next town, where he stopped at a motel and paid for the night.

He didn't like motels. Nothing was as comforting as his own bed, his own house. With Mo and Sarah. But none of that was possible now and so maybe the Rock Creek Inn would do. Just for one lonely night.

Eric didn't turn on the tv or even the lights. He opened the door, threw his duffle on the ground, and sat on the edge of the bed. A good night's sleep would do him wonders, he reasoned. Yet something told him his sleep would not be the distraction he hoped.

Eric sat for a long while on the edge of the ugly green-brown bedspread. He sat, alone with himself, until exhaustion brought him down. And into dreams…

He lingered in dreams on the edge of burning prairies and trees and homes, waterways and skies reflecting the terrible devastation. He would run from the flames, every time, only to find himself back again. Over and over he ran, never waking, only seeing. When finally his dreams moved to her, he was glad for her presence. More so than he had ever been.

As ever she was elusive, the girl with the braid of dark hair. She too like the flames, lingered on the edge of his vision, dancing off like a mirage -a man's hysterical hope in the middle of a wasteland- only to reappear closer, yet ever beyond his reach. He would call out to her, her name now, loving still the way it felt upon his lips, and she would pause. She would turn to him, sadly, every time, over and over an image of terrible sadness and utter words he knew but could not hear. Times he would come close, touching the fabric of her dress, a strand of loose hair. But she would slip from his grasp, moving not from him but simply moving, he realized, as though by time and unseen forces. Time, and all the other horrible things that took what he loved most from him.

Eric woke at the sound of his name. It came around him, around the both of them, caught in a dreamscape of ruins and roots. Of a fallen castle on the edge of black water that ebbed and flowed among the scattered rocks. His name came to him from the air and the sky. It came as the cry of birds, as the call of something wild and fierce. It chilled his bones; it halted them both. Snow turned to him, for the first time her eyes turning desperate and alarmed. She reached out for him, herself caught amongst the rocks like a tide pool, reaching out for him in anguish and fear, her mouth curving into a single word. A single terrible word: _Run_.

Eric woke to his name.

The motel room was dark. He blinked his eyes a few times, expecting them to adjust. They didn't. The darkness stayed. It breathed. It latched to him like some living thing, clinging to his skin, darkening it as well. Eric sat up. His heart pounded in his ears.

Everyone was afraid of the dark. But this was something more than that.

Eric swung his feet over the bed and stepped down, carefully, slowly. Feeling for the dingy carpet beneath his feet. It was there, even though he couldn't see it. He stood and outstretched his arms, feeling for things in the dark. He faltered and almost fell once; he ran into a lamp, grimacing as he heard it fall and break. His fingers finally found the switch on the wall but though he flicked it many times, no lights illuminated the room.

Eric was struggling to find the door, struggling to keep his wits about him when he heard his name again.

"Mr Huntsman."

Eric froze. The darkness seemed to rustle around him like cloth or paper. The sound was like voices, quiet chattering voices. Excited voices.

"Who's there?" his own voice was level and firm. It showed nothing of the raging sea of uncertainty tossing inside him.

A pause followed. So long that Eric thought he might have imagined the voice; so long even that he doubted he had awaken from his dreams and was instead caught in some dreadful nightmare. And then he heard the smile.

In the darkness someone smiled, wide and wicked, and the dark smiled too.

"You are searching for something, are you not, Mr. Huntsman?" Eric tried to find the source of the voice, pinpoint where it originated. But it was slick and slippery and moved with his outstretched fingers, swinging from side to side and around him to whisper in his left ear or brush the corner of his right elbow.

"And what if I am?" Eric countered, feeling a bit of that bravado from the truck stop filling him again. He would not be toyed with.

"You are searching for her," said the voice, coming up from his feet and under his ribs. There was a _tsking _sound; the sound of severe displeasure. Eric could feel a change in the darkness: it pressed down and in, it thickened like soup and burned. "And that we cannot allow."

"What do you want with her?" Eric challenged, moving forward through the dark, searching. "Why is my business any of your concern?"

"It is not your business," came the answer. "It is ours."

Eric bumped into the side of the bed, cursing as he stumbled to the floor. He pulled himself back up through the darkness that felt now like sand, heavy and drowning. "What the hell does that mean?" He roared, his words pushing back at the blackness.

"We keep the way," the voice said, beckoning from locked doors and hidden corners.

"And what way is that?"

"The way of things, as they were and as they are and as they ever shall be. You cannot change the way. You never will."

Eric felt close, the voice had stopped moving and instead it had grown, in fierceness and passion. It seemed to crack almost, at the tip of it's certainty. And it centered, somewhere just before Eric's fingers. He felt so close. All he had to do was reach…

Eric felt himself flung across the room. He crashed into the wall, the air shooting from his lungs and his every bone crying out. He landed in a heap on the floor, gasping for breath.

"You cannot save her, Huntsman. You should not even try," warned the oily voice, looming before him, the words drifting across the skin of his neck like a dark caress. Like a horrible promise. The shape of something _someone_ outlined in the dark, ebbing like a bruise, beating like a furious heart.

Eric expelled his words in huffs of swollen air. "And if I try?" He sounded cocky, sure, and terrifying in his own right.

The smile came again despite his daring. This time Eric felt it, like a knife under his ribs. It was the smile of assurance, and victory. "Then you will be as you always have been: _broken_."

Sunlight streamed in through the open window. Sunlight so sudden and so bright it caused Eric to cry out and cover his eyes. Spots lingered in his vision as he slowly rose from the floor, sucking in a breath at the shooting pain. A broken lamp stared accusingly at him from the floor. His last thought, however, was on the bill for the damages.

The darkness was gone. As swiftly as an impossible thought. But the quake in his fingers remained. Alone, again, finally, he allowed himself to feel beneath that rise of anger, to the confusion and the fear that lingered in the undercurrent of his boldness. Something was happening to him. Something impossible and unexplainable. Something insane.

But as true as it was, something was more sure: _Snow_.

And no warning. No parlor tricks. No threat could keep him from finding her. It was necessary. It was an uncompromising fact.

He would find her. He would save her.


	6. Chapter 6

_Notes and Such: _#firstworldproblems I was without internet for four days and my life literally shut down. I am just complaining because I can... and because I have valid reasons to have internet: bills. Internet providers suck, just saying. Oh well, all is good now. Happy days are here to stay, YAY! This chapter is brought to readers by the letter X and how I always type it instead of Z. Anyone else miss Sesame Street? Yeah, me too. Good times. ...this is all ramble. I am sure you skipped it. Ok, reward: GOODIES this is a new chapter. And guess what! It will be followed by another. The story is about to get good. Or, I dunno, maybe not. At any rate: I thank you for reading. From the bottom of my fuzzy heart.

_Thanks and Shout-Outs:_ To all the wonderful _longsuffering_ reviewers. You are my lifeblood. I continue this for you. xo

* * *

_**nobody said it would be easy  
no one ever said it would be this hard  
take me back to the start**_

A grey cloud followed Eric as he drove. His hands were tight on the steering wheel and he pretended not to notice the white in his knuckles and the clench in his chest, but it lingered nonetheless. The morning had brought with it a clear memory of the sharp and gnashing darkness. It seemed to be nothing more than monster and nightmare than anything real, but Eric was sure it had been real. He could feel it still in the bright day, lingering like sweat on his brow, clumping like ash and decay on his tongue. It had left its mark on him, the dark visit: he was shaken. He wiped the quake from his hands on his denim-clad thigh but it didn't stick. He was out of his depth, his determination limping after his faltering heart.

Perhaps he couldn't do it. Perhaps he hadn't the will within him to complete this mad quest. Only a few miles left and he knew to the deepest parts of his soul he would be closer than ever to finding her. But at what cost? The night's recollection rested on him like a terrible caress; from the corner of his eye, he could swear to see a brush of black pressed into skin, like a crushed ember, like a tattooed handprint.

Eric shivered involuntarily and almost turned around. A fragile hope kept him steady:

If something wanted him away, something greater still wanted him to continue. He knew it now, as surely as he breathed air. Something had guided him this far, put in motion the strange events that set him on his way. He couldn't give up now. Her mournful cadence could not become his swan song, the final act to his search.

Eric held on to that same hope as he passed the town sign, a blur of wood and white paint. Ravenwood welcomed him, reflecting a wood-carving of trees and river and homesteaders in the sun. Eric felt an instant jolt of nostalgia tinged with sadness, a rush of half-snipped memories from dusty years. He was not surprised that this would be the place to which he would return; on the other side of dreams and happenings that seemed months ago instead of only days, he was certain that this place would illuminate the end.

Ravenwood held his past. Perhaps it too could hold the answer to his future.

The town had changed in the slow, small ways that things do with the passing of years. Saplings had turned into trees, tall and shady. Houses had likewise grown, springing up over farmland and pressed in alongside roadways cutting like rivers through a town more than tripled in population since Eric had known it as home. He hardly remembered it, so long had been the years. He stopped in an intersection beneath the bright red of a stoplight and worry pounded in his chest. His fingers began again to tremble and his stomach heaved for something strong and bitter to fill it, give him courage or numb peace.

_Do you drink to drown your shame, Eric?_

Sudden came the sound of the church bell, tolling steady in the distance, echoing out the haunted memory of his mother's spiteful words. It rang out like a divine sign and his heart calmed instantly at the sound. It beckoned to him, like a sweet hymn, calling him. In his heart and in his mind, Eric knew to follow.

. . .

The church at the edge of town looked the same as it had twenty years past. Eric's gaze lingered on the weathered clapboard of the white chapel, and rose to glimpse the point of the steeple and the flash of the ringing bell off the daylight. It had been half a lifetime since he'd occupied a pew in the church and his last memory bit at him uncomfortably: the day of his father's funeral. An uncertainty kept him behind the wheel long after the great oak doors had closed. His truck idled in the near full parking lot and with it, his resolution.

A radio station hummed quietly with static but through it he could hear the chorus of voices beyond the stained glass windows. The sounds turned to a sermon he could not make out and then finally did he turn the key and step out of the truck, pausing to stretch. Eric did not enter the church, instead he slipped around the side and toward the graveyard he knew lay beyond.

The headstones seemed shorter than before, but then, he had grown some since his father had been set below the hallowed ground. His feet took him under the boughs of the trees and over the uneven earth. Markers new and old greeted his presence without pause, going on in their purpose of overlooking the resting place of their charges. Eric paused to stoop and read a few of the older inscribed stones, smiling wistfully at the lovely chiseled words. A few huge monoliths of wealth and import rose above the rest, scattered sparsely through the stretching burial ground. These he circled wide, some strange fear keeping him from crossing beneath the shadow of the angel or cross. He reached his father's grave without hurry.

He settled to rest on his heels before the stone, passing a hesitant hand over the polished face, his fingers trailing over the name and chinks caused by weather and storm. It was a lovely marker, a burning red luster, medium-sized and tasteful. It bore his father's name, dates, and a simple inscription below: "Loving Husband and Father."

Tears came into Eric's eyes unbidden. He wiped at them, ashamed at himself. Too long ago were the sorrows of a lost little boy, he determined with peace he'd learned to accept; it would be useless to shed them at the feet of memory and stone. Eric rose, albeit unsteadily, and bid his father goodbye.

The service was letting out. Eric could hear the car doors slamming, see the gathering breaking off to go to their Sunday plans.

Sunday. Eric halted. Was it Sunday already? The days had left him in their wake, gone on without his marking their passing. He'd been so intent, focused completely. Now, in the brief clarity, seeing clearer perhaps from the bright day, it seemed strange, and he out of place with the realization. Eric shook his head, unsure whether to be anxious or dismissive. He glanced ahead to the tight cluster of trees at the opening of the graveyard and raised his hand to block the afternoon sun. There, under the awning built of tree limbs and dark leaves, he saw a dark mass, perhaps the shadowed figure of a man, watching him.

Eric felt a stab of guilt. He'd surely been trespassing; maybe church graveyards held different rules than others. He quickened his step and pasted a grin on his face, hoping the man would be charitable given the day.

"Hello," he shouted as he came nearer, stretching out his hand. "I'm sorry I came through here, I was just looking for…"

Eric's voice died on his tongue. The trees broke the sun and his eyes adjusted quickly, taking in a shock of milky white against the darkness, things he had mistaken to be separate. From a distance he had seen only the shimmer, up close he could see the truth. It was neither man, nor man-shaped. At least not yet. It was a mass of black, darkness swirling and whispering, oozing and boiling. It was bent into the shadow of the trees, throbbing like the neck of a great beast dipped into a tranquil lake, and like a thirsty animal, it seemed to be swallowing up the shade, drawing it into itself, absorbing it, forming it. The mass began to twist, stretch out in all directions like a star. It became slender, tall, huge. It began to look like the figure he'd thought he'd seen: arms, legs, torso. The cut of white warped, moved in the dark like a pale star, centering and coming to rest at the topmost point, like a head. Eyes pooled out of the darkness and a thin line split open at the bottom. Eric realized with a sick turn of his stomach it was a mouth, curving upward like a smile.

Eric didn't move. He couldn't breath. He felt the breeze on his back and knew he was not dreaming. The darkness came into it's complete form before him, taking a single step forward, closing the space between them. It seemed to be a man, but he could not tell. It was tall, bald and blinding white against the contrasting darkness. It's face was scarred, it's black-pit eyes dangerous and thin lips posed as if it'd just told a delicious joke. It appraised Eric with the glance of something large looking over something very unimportant and it's smile reeked like poison.

"Hello, Mr Huntsman," it said, it's voice sounding like an empty chasm - it's voice chattering like the beaks of a thousand birds - it's voice smothering like the pure darkness from which it was made. "We meet again."


	7. Chapter 7

_Notes and Such: _In case of confusion: the 'person' in the last chapter is the same formless darkness that visited Eric in the motel room- that gets explained here further. Sorry if there was confusion or anything, I tried to describe it as best I could. Hopefully this chapter helps... its short, and I apologize. But it changes the game.** Thanks always to my lovely reviewers: your words are my encouragement and my true delight.** And on that note: I don't mind favorites or follows but I need words to know if the story is doing well. If you read, please review.

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_**this is the way it ends  
don't tell me it's meaningless**_

_**we fall**_

The sun seemed to have fallen behind the clouds. Everything was terribly dark. Eric tried not to fear; he knew the cause stood before him. It was the monster and nightmare from the motel room, the whispering darkness now made manifest. Impossible thoughts, he knew in some rational way and yet it was undeniable. It gathered whole before him, and wore a suit of shadowed black that danced in and out of focus before his eyes, like it could not hold on to it's own illusion. Eric did not waver as the figure circled him, though inside the cage of his ribs his heart beat furiously. The dark being smelled like fire and decay and it's nearness leaned over him like despair, filling his heart with anguish and his bones with ache.

He knew that feeling; he'd felt it before. He remembered his sadness of the cabin, the catch of the living nightmare in the diner, the swallowing fear in the motel. That same terror was what he felt now. It ebbed some as the obsidian creature completed it's turn around him, like a master surveying his slave.

"That was you last night," Eric said, his voice sounding stronger than he felt. The figure seemed to nod, a smoky image made an awkward bend of it's whole body. "And before?" He ventured his theory.

It spoke, its voice leeching into Eric's heart like poison. "We are capable of many things," it announced, neither confirming nor denying. Eric did not miss the wreck of it's smile however, like it had seen the action somewhere and got it all wrong.

Eric remembered the flames, the way they'd licked at him, like some mongrel pup. The weight of the smoke and the fear clouding his head and his lungs. He remembered the realness, his complete inability to surface the dark imagining, to break into what was real. In that moment, crawling on the floor for salvation, he had not known what was real. The idea made him tremble.

"Well," Eric laughed, trying to shrug off the terror. "That's some parlor trick."

His dismissive attitude hit the mark. The shadowed thing bristled, anger coursing out like ripples in water. "You think we are some trick," it sneered, its voice oozing like tar, thick and crushing. It's grooved face twisted. "We warned you, Huntsman. You should not doubt us."

The figure reached out and flicked its shadowy hand in the space between them.

Eric began to choke, the air around him became black smoke, void of oxygen.

"It will not do for you to take us lightly," it advised, an amiable turn to its dark tenor. It's dark form swallowed up the sun and the trees and pressed in, suffocating him. It pushed at Eric like it had in the motel, thick and without surface or end. It pushed in harder now as though the darkness had tangible weight; as though he would snap together like a telescope.

"We will bring you pain, great and terrible." It's promise cut into him, the words seared and hurt. Eric bit back a cry. His vision blurred, his chest burned. He fell to the ground, the hard roots and dirty earth grinding into his knees and palms, digging into his cheek as he gasped for air. He coughed and moaned, his body rebelling against him, curling in on itself.

And the pain was gone, suddenly. The darkness abated, pulling back into the figure. The creature had proven it's point.

Eric sucked air into his lungs. Gasping and sputtering, he slowly stretched out his taught limbs. Everything ached. He pushed himself up, feeling aged, shaken. The figure waited and Eric smiled.

He couldn't help it: it slipped onto his face with ease, and the words after. "Is that the best you've got?" he challenged, spitting wet dust from his lips. He was hunched over, his hands resting on his knees; he was not the picture of confidence and victory. His words tripped over his hoarse throat but they made an impact nonetheless.

"Arrogance," it acknowledged with a tip of it's terrible face. "You have not changed, Huntsman."

Eric shook his head and rose to his full height despite the pain in his joints and muscle. "You don't know me," he charged, hearing the severity in his own tone and liking it.

This time the figure laughed. It was something out of a nightmare, or a horror film. It was a twisted picture of terrible glee.

"It is you, Huntsman, that does not know himself. So many dark places to hide, so many things to forget. We remember all."

"What does that mean?" he growled. "What is it you _think_ you know?"

"You run from us. You fight us. But we are here always," it brushed the length of Eric's arm with shadowed fingers. Pain did not return but Eric pulled away sharply at the caress. "We cling to the skin you wear. We suck on your sadness," the darkness tossed back it's head, like a wolf bathing in the scent of its prey. It shuddered in delight, the form breaking apart for a moment, cracking like black dry earth. It pulled itself back together seamlessly and dropped it's dark eyes to Eric, unwavering. "But you fall, all of your little soldiers for naught. You fall. And we go on. We keep the way."

Eric rolled his shoulders. The words of the ebony being dug under his skin. Yet instead of fear, he felt fury. A twitch of anger begging his fingers for a scratch. "Look, enough of this cryptic bullshit," he snapped. "If you're trying to frighten me, it's not going to work."

The darkness tilted its head and for a long moment regarded him with puncture-wound eyes, blinking a shadow across them once. Then it leaned in close, hovering over Eric like a cloud. Its cut mouth split wide, revealing a crescent moon abyss, blackness instead of teeth or tongue. It looked like a swirling sea of wings, black birds becoming one, endless mass. When it spoke, its voice was the sound of a thousand ravenous fowl, echoing in utter conviction.

"If you desire fear, we will show you fear."

The shape shifted, it slipped and melted. In the blink of an eye, it's solid form shattered and the separate tendrils of smoke hardened, becoming a lumbering height of black prisms, glittering glass shards, shimmering in the pale sunlight. It screeched like a huge bird, it's cry like a claws on a chalkboard. It rose to an impossible height and then crashed down upon him. The shards cut into him, slicing open his skin. It hit him like a wave, tossed him up and then down, into the ground and beyond it. The air rushed into his mouth, sharp-edged. It ripped at his tongue and his throat; it nicked holes into his lungs. He tried to cry out as the darkness swallowed him but could not. He fell, tumbling through darkness and thought, losing himself, ripping apart and coming back together. The world fell away, far beyond him, and when it rushed back, it did so with force.

But it was another world.

There was a staccato of bright lights at the far reaches of his vision. Eric tried to focus on them, but he felt mired in water, treading the deep like a dream, his limbs heavy and unresponsive. There were sounds as well, distant but growing close. He felet hands upon him, hot breath at his ear forming words, words he did not understand, voices yelling unintelligible things. There was a pressure in his head, under his eyes, clogged at the back of his throat. It was the darkness, he supposed. It was all around him still, choking at him. He tried to struggle but couldn't move. He could barely breathe. But there was a pain, a dull pain. It grew stronger, with the light and the words. It came at him like a Mack truck, all at one, coming over the horizon of never-ending blackness.

Eric's eyes flew open. His body was on fire, there were hammers in his head, a sharp pain at the crook of his arm. His heart raced, his every vein and fiber in agony. He opened his mouth and heard only a cry or a scream. He realized suddenly he was on his apartment floor. Glass riddled the space around him, dug into his hands and his back: a dozen bottles smashed. Blood ran like small rivers from the cuts on his arms and pooled around his wrists.

Tom looked down into his face. He mouthed his name, true fear hollowing his eyes.

"Stay with me, buddy," Eric heard. "Stay with me!"

Eric's eyes closed, pain drawing him under. He expected to wake up, this just another imagining. But... the reason escaped him. He had been searching, he knew. He had... looking for, something. No, _someone_. Someone important... Where had he been? It was somewhere bright, somewhere sad. And the darkness... Eric couldn't remember.

_Why couldn't he remember?!_

Pain throbbed again, illuminating the dark of his mind, the hidden things. It outlined memories in sharp clarity.

Eric remembered Sarah.

The slam of a door and angry words. He hadn't meant to fight. He'd never wanted to fight. A terrible tragedy gripped him, like a hand in the center of his chest. He felt himself falling again, the memory of the awful thing pulling at him, willing him to follow. To let it all go. And Eric wanted to follow. He wanted to forget. He wanted to cease.

Something warm filled him, bursting through his limbs, his heart, his head. The darkness faded and he gasped, his eyelids flickered, bringing in flashes of sight, fragments of sound. Eric hovered, somewhere in between awake and asleep, not sure which was which. He knew he needed to remember something but could not remember what or why it was so important. Voices came into hearing: a sigh of relief, a murmur of joy. Someone grasped his shoulder: reassurance.

And at the back of his mind Eric heard a rustle, a flutter of winged darkness, the crack of a smile.

The warmth kicked in and overwhelmed the sensation of loss: a flood of drugs to his system, and the anxiety and pain scattered. Disappeared.

Eric felt no more.


	8. Chapter 8

_Notes and Such:_ deepest apologies for the delay. Work puts such a strain on my writing time, and then being sick three times and dealing with all the election hullaballo I just had no time. But I offer this... and more soon to come. Thank you to all my long-suffering readers and your patience. I adore you.

_Thanks and Shout-Outs:_ **radagast-brown**, **m**, **hlee0890** (thanks for the beautiful words and taking a chance), and **Amasayda** for their support!

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**_something for what ails you_**

"I thought we'd lost you for sure," Janice gripped her horn-rimmed glasses with white fingers and used her other hand to dab a Kleenex at the corners of her eyes. "If Tom hadn't checked up on you after that call from Mrs. Hattenberg, I just don't know…"

Eric felt more than cramped in the circle of her hand, and at the pressure of her words. He'd heard the story already a half dozen times already from his various visitors, coworkers and such. His own side of things, or what he could remember of the events preceding Tom and the other paramedics breaking down his apartment door, were no less embarrassing and painful, although fuzzier. He hated being reminded of how close he'd come… and how that very same had affected the people he had left in his life. Like Janice.

"I'm just glad they did," Eric whispered, turning his gaze to the darkened window, his throat raw and scratchy. He was sure someday that his appreciation would outweigh his sense of shame, but at the moment, it did not. In ways he felt very much the dead man he could have become if left to drown in alcohol and blood loss, there with only a stray cat for company in a house as empty as the center of his chest. In ways he truly believed he deserved no reprieve of hospital bed recovery, or compassion.

Janice took his hand and gave it a squeeze. Her kind brown eyes brought him back from his despondency, steadied him a moment as surely as a cup of her delicious coffee. "I'm so sorry," she said, the sadness in her voice tipping the scale on his own saddened heart, "I'm so very sorry for your loss, Eric."

And there it was. So many terrible times, the same phrase over and over and over. Many had stopped speaking the words aloud and left the mongrel condolence to only illuminate their pitying eyes. Furtive glances, like he was something fragile; only a ticking moment away from breaking into a thousand pieces. After Sarah's death, they'd never looked at him the same way. Questioned him when he took no time off and dove straight into double shifts and extra weekend hours. He'd resented it; thought he was healing. It was hard even to come to terms with the truth now: he'd buried his grief, and almost died.

Eric felt the tears rush hot and fast into his eyes, and a lump form at the back of his throat. He swallowed around it and nodded.

"Thanks, Janice," he managed out from wheeze-box lungs.

Eric was a wreck. Only two days had passed since he'd been found amid a spread of broken glass bottles, soaked through, and bleeding rivers of alcohol. His body still ached from the memory. The shallow cuts along the back of his arms and neck hurt in small consistent ways, dull and frustratingly beyond his quota of pain medication. The detox had left it's toll as well, leaving his insides feeling as cut up and raw as his throat. To think he'd fallen that low…

Janice checked her watch and confirmed she was off break. Eric thanked her for talking with him, and for the vase of fabric flowers she'd left at his bedside. Janice offered him a kind smile, something motherly and lined in compassion; something that made him long for better memories of his own mother, long gone.

She paused at the doorway. "The doctor will be stopping in. To check up on you," she said, leaving him again on his own.

Guilt and shame battled for equal shares of the quiet moments with which he was left. They tore in with claws and bite, demanding he pay heed and not for a second allow himself rest. It's all part of the process, he assured himself at the unending attacks, and let them continue. Did he deserve any less anyway?

The white walls stood witness to the agonizing hours of healing he weathered alone; sterile and unforgiving. He now remembered how he loved the ambulance; at least there he could open a window. The sick and injured moved from his helping hands into others more capable and not once did he have cause to linger longer than needed. He'd never been confined to a hospital bed like so many he'd assisted, not once in his life. And now he absolutely hated it. Perhaps it was the waiting that was torturous. Too many reasons kept Eric awake, but many more haunted his sleep.

Eric scrubbed a hand over his rough jaw and pressed his fingertips into his eyes until he saw spots. For a moment, the battling voices were quiet and the claustrophobic confines of the room seemed to grow less desolate.

When his vision cleared, Eric saw Dr. Muir standing in the doorway. In the large rectangle of the door, his small stature seemed even smaller. Yet his height was deceiving. Though small, the man had been practicing so long as Mercy Light the term didn't apply anymore. He was renowned and respected.

Dr Muir set his cane against the bedside and took a seat in the very wooden chair Janice had only just vacated. Pale mid-afternoon sun filtered in through the shade to halo his silver hair.

Dr. Muir was not like any other resident psychologist Eric knew. He didn't carry a clipboard. He didn't hum over medical documents like a child over a captured ant. Most times, Eric forgot Angus Muir was even a doctor. This was how he felt now, as Dr Muir settled in with an acquired ease and relaxed his aged frame like an old friend seeing another. Anxiety evaporated from Eric's worn muscles.

"So, Mr. Huntsman, how are you feeling?" His voice was weathered and aged, like the bark of an old tree.

Eric offered a wry grin. "I've been better, Doc."

Dr. Muir nodded. "Surely. We are all glad it was not worse. You should be very thankful for your choice of friends, Mr. Huntsman."

Eric dropped his eyes under the intensity of the elder man's gaze.

"Now," continued the doctor, his voice yet never wavering from the gentle line of wisdom and kindness, "have you been able to remember anything more?"

The memories hurt, deep in his stomach and at the back of his mind. The images of his purported weekend long stint of alcohol and depression were tacked behind his eyes like grim post-its. They came forth only in snippets and fragments, seeming both far-removed yet also personal, as though he'd seen the decline of a sad man in a movie once but felt the effects as surely as they'd happened to him.

Eric shut his eyes and tried to recall. Pushing past layers buried and rotten, he tried to remember the beginning.

"We took a bad call," he said. "Triple car wreck. One woman dead on arrival. I went home, got drunk." Eric had trouble meeting Dr Muir's eyes, kind as they were. He focused his attention instead on the IV stuck into the back of his hand and the way the tendons rose under his skin as he flexed and clenched his fingers against the white sheet.

"I got really drunk. I think… I think Tom called and asked about fishing. That must have started it. My dad, you see, well he always… he…" Memories led to others, doors and wounds, tender still despite the years. One thing always led to another, each cracked wall toppling onto another and another, falling like dominoes. It shattered him a little now even, like it always did, much like it must have then.

"It all just hit me, you know? I'm rubbish without Sarah. All over the place and angry and sad and lost. I've had trouble… coping. She would have hated me getting that drunk like that, trying to deal with everything like I used to before she came along. But maybe that's why I did," Eric felt sick at the idea, sicker still at it's truth. He remembered the rage, the complete loss of control, of thought, of will. He remembered the sound the picture frame made as it shattered, the way it echoed in the house. It had made sense somehow, he reasoned in the aftermath. In some strange terrible way: broken thing. The rest of the pictures followed, and the bottles afterward.

"I think I tripped," Eric concluded uncertainly, softly, his throat tired, his eyes watery. He didn't remember the fall, or why. He remembered a darkness, rushing at him, overtaking him. Perhaps it had been the alcoholic haze of grateful unconsciousness. He didn't remember fear or acceptance, only the flashing lights, the ebbing pain, and the trials of resuscitation at the hands of a frantic friend.

Silence followed his sparse recollections. As the quiet wore on, eventually Eric rose his eyes to meet Dr Muir's and found the other to be staring past him, his face turned unreadable, his gaze afar off. The moment passed and Dr Muir settled his eyes once more on Eric. This time, Eric did not look away.

"Do you remember coming to see me, before? The prescription I gave you?"

Eric began to nod and then paused. Prescription? He pushed himself to remember. Yes, Dr Muir had prescribed him something, hadn't he?

"Something to help me sleep," he cited, an autonomous response, subconscious.

Dr. Muir shook his head. "No, my boy, something to help your sleep."

"I had bad dreams," Eric said suddenly, the realization hitting him sideways, tasting true on his tongue but feeling somehow false. His body reeled a little from the impact, unsure.

This time the doctor nodded, his manner more vigorous. "Yes, you came to see me before the accident. Do you remember the dreams?"

The sound of it rang true but Eric could not understand why. Dark clouds surfaced in his mind, formless and familiar. He knew he should remember but he could not, not that far. Not for something so…

"Doctor, excuse me, but is this important?" Eric questioned, his head beginning to throb.

"It holds greater importance than you now know, Mr. Huntsman," he explained. Dr. Muir pressed the question again, leaning forward in the chair. "Can you remember?"

The murky image cleared and for a moment Eric thought he saw a girl. She flashed by his sight for only the space of a heartbeat and then was gone again, swallowed up in a darkness so complete he was almost willing to believe he hadn't remembered her at all. Yet his heart had begun to beat a little faster, and a terrible feeling had crept into his lungs. Something did not want to be remembered, he was certain of that. And more so than that, the very same something was frightening.

The fear pushed the confrontation to his tongue. This time he was direct and firm. "Dr. Muir, why are you asking me this? Why is this important?" His gruff tone was muffled by his dry throat, his crackled lips, but effective nonetheless.

Dr. Muir leaned back in the chair and rested his wizened hands upon his knees.

"Mr. Huntsman, I know that you would prefer me to be forthcoming with you. But for the sake of the past, I must be meticulous. I know you to be an intelligent man, though not always the most willing to believe. But you have always eventually understood, and its that same hope that I come to you with now, and beg you to dispense with fear and doubt and understand me now, as you have before."

Being the most words Eric had ever heard the old man speak, Eric could do nothing else in response but nod. And so Dr. Muir continued.

"You have had a terrible misdeed done to you, Mr. Huntsman. Many like it have been done in the past and, if we fail again, this will not be the last. But you must think hard to remember, despite the pain and the fear and the Dark. You must remember that all is not what it is, that you have been manipulated at your weakest moment and upon all your weakest moments in an attempt to keep you from your greatest."

Eric held up his hand. "You are talking in riddles, sir, and I don't understand a word. What do you mean _if we fail again_? What must I remember?"

Dr. Muir paused, looking far more aged than Eric had ever seen him. Ancient almost. At last he said, "Do you believe in fate, Mr. Huntsman?"

At this Eric was lost. If an honest inquiry, he was not sure he had an honest answer to give. All those moments of his life: part of a great design?

"I don't know," he said, finally.

"You were meant for a greater fate. That is why you must remember her."

Eric felt something tender and chilling drop into the pit of his stomach. "Her? Who, _her_?" The murky images swirled again and he saw her in his mind: a girl, pale skin and raven colored hair. Her smile faded in a swift burst of pain across his forehead. On impulse, his hand grasped for the nurse call button but it was beyond his reach.

"They were not bad dreams, Huntsman, only the memories of lifetimes loved and lost. They plague you with every new beginning, they push you forward, become the obsession of your soul. And you run to find her, knowing the salvation she holds for you and has always."

Pain raged across his forehead now, beginning at his temples and echoing through his body. Light and sound hurt. The soft sheets felt hard and jagged under his touch. The images returned again without bidding and something greater than his own strength battled their resurfacing.

"Sarah," he cried, lost, his voice a broken whisper.

"She is many names, Huntsman. But you knew her once and first as Snow."

_She called out for him amid a field blazing red under a black sky. Flames curled like dragon's breath and roared over the screams of the dying. She called for him, struggling through the brackish water, running for safety, running for him. But he had gone. He hadn't looked back. Her voice followed him long after, and far away, a ghost now, and his cowardice to keep him company…_

Eric gasped. The memory tore the air from his lungs. The white walls drew back into sharp and blinding focus. Dr. Muir looked at him, a thin smile breaking across his face.

"What was that?" Eric wheezed.

"You were meant for something better, Huntsman. You began as we all do, in spite of a harsh world. You were once terrified and tortured, very nearly brought down by the very things that plague you even now. But then you were gifted an opportunity, a decision. A moment to embrace something beautiful and forgiving. You were meant to follow her, protect her and she alone would set you free. But you fell victim to your old sins. Your grief turned you coward, and in the moment when she needed you most, you abandoned her. But you were given a second chance even then.

"This is the farthest you've come. There have been better and worse versions of yourself, echoes throughout time if you will. If you think harder on them, you will undoubtedly reacquaint yourself. But you must remember this, above all else, that every turn of fate requires a decision."

Eric felt the shake begin within him. Everything breaking lose, all _everything_ called into question. And this man, this man he'd trusted telling him now, what? Fairytales and hokum? The quake turned to shudder and Eric suddenly felt ill.

"So," he began quietly, slowly, "you're saying I have past lifetimes? That I was supposed to be some fairytale hero and I failed so I've been doomed to endure a cycle of lifetimes searching?" He looked hard at the elder man, his eyes throwing sparks.

Dr. Muir remained steadfast. "Sometimes the bonds of this world are bent. Sometimes there are things strong enough to break them. Curses are strong. Love is stronger still."

Eric laughed aloud. It hurt his chest and his throat. "Ah, so it's love is it? Well, sir, this is quite the tale."

With a ferocious determination, Eric tugged back the sheets and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The IV tore at his hand and with a roar he pulled it out. The world tilted harshly as he stood upright; he gripped the bedrail for support.

"You play a convincing con, Doctor. Though to what end I cannot fathom." Anger licked the edges of his words. Eric rose to his full height, his chest beating and his head swimming. Fast fury boiled in his veins. "You come in here telling me this trumped up story and with such sincerity. What do you take me for, some fool? Do you think I injured myself so far beyond the point of rationality?! There is no such thing as reincarnation. We die and are buried and that is the end." Eric was six feet of ferocity. He pointed his finger at the doctor, who yet sat calm despite by his rage. This did more to incite Eric than a cowering confession would have. His voice rose to a shout, aching and cracking as he drove home his final point.

"There is no other life, no other lifetimes, and no second chances to save any self or love, not even those of the story book kind!"

Eric's fury fell into the silence that followed. The strange unnerving silence of the hospital room. Dr. Muir appraising him with his unwaveringly kind eyes. Then he slowly stood, rested his weight on his cane and delivered his last words.

"If what you say is true, then there exists only the dark. And therefore do I fear for us all, Huntsman." He turned and exited the room without so much as a backward glance.

Eric stood what seemed hours in the wake of his departure, gripping the rail with white knuckles until the weight made his legs shake. It was only mere moments however as Janice rushed in, glasses askew, having heard the shouting. She was a flurried mess, helping Eric back into bed and reinserting the IV. Eric was lost in his own thoughts, and the growing shame of his outburst. He didn't hear a word of her chatter.

He'd been too hard on the old man perhaps. It'd been ages since he'd ever been so angry. Yet, it was all a crock of lies. Every terrible ridiculous word. How could he have responded any different?

Janice was looking at him. Eric quickly snapped out of his thoughts.

"What?" he made to say, but the words came out a mere huff of air. Janice smiled and repeated her question:

"Water?"

Eric nodded gratefully. Janice turned, her hand out for the water jug and collided with the vase on the bedside table. With a loud crash the vase hit the floor, shattering into sparkling pieces, ruined flowers amongst the mess.

"Oh, rats!" Janice exclaimed, immediately frustrated with her unusual clumsiness. She bent to retrieve some of the fallen fragments and with them, Eric's wallet, which had taken a tumble with the glassware.

"Here, hon," she apologized, laying the leather wallet on Eric's lap. Eric chuckled off the mishap in gently rolling whispers, the fury from the confrontation leaving him entirely. Janice quickly poured him a cup of water which Eric drank thankfully. She then scurried off in search of a broom and dust pan.

Eric set aside the cup on the now empty bedside and made to replace his wallet when something caught his eye.

Something red.

Strangely curious, Eric tugged the folded paper out of his wallet. It was a plain white sheet and Eric had the vague recollection of the folds as he smoothed them out. It was a drawn picture. Muddy browns, a landscape of ruins. And there, in the center, drawn all in red was a man, like a burning figure. It was a hasty, half-talented drawing except for the face, which showed true and clear the artist's model.

Eric felt his cheeks go pale. Air came in quick bursts to his lungs and his limbs tightened.

"Red," he said, the words coming forth like a once-forgotten song, "for remembrance."


	9. Chapter 9

_Notes and Such:_ no need for more excuses. although i do find myself recently engaged. so yay! :D other than that, i have no excuse and hope this chapter finds you all well!

_Thank Yous and Shout Outs:_ **hlee0890**: thank you for your encouragement and patient hopefulness. i promise real snow soon! the person kind, not the precipitation sort. **cmb897**: so glad the confusion is gone! hope this chap doesn't make a step backward... :/ **guest**: *reels you in* ha ha! **Lenalove95**: synopsis in inbox... hope it helps. apologies for the confusion! **Amasayda**: welcome! here's another! :D **His Singer1**: oooh! thank you! **sulou** and **ktikat13**: update! hope you like! :D

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_**world collapsing**_

He didn't hear her return.

"What a mess," Janice said, jerking Eric out of thought and disbelief. His eyes ripped upward from the paper to see her striding into the room, a small broom and dust pan in her hands. He stared at her as she bent to sweep up the shattered glass.

"Don't mind me," she continued with a forced laugh, her frustration with her earlier clumsiness straining the tone of her voice.

Eric didn't. His mind was miles away, remembering now with sharp clarity the motel, the dark night, the apple pie. His mouth watered: that homemade taste.

But it was impossible. He hadn't been in Four Lakes; he hadn't met a head-strong young girl, or narrowly missed hitting a white stag. He'd stayed home with his cat, drowned his sorrows… and ended up here, hooked to machines, feeling the sharp ache of mortality in his bones.

Hadn't he?

Eric was no fool. He did not hold to fancy tales and jokes. But a doubt nonetheless slid into his mind as he tried to work out the true from the untrue. The paper was solid in his hands. The edges were sharp and bit at his tender fingertips. He traced the image: it was unnerving but yet real, the likeness uncanny. Mikey, with her golden curls and no nonsense attitude, and eyes as deep as the heavens. _Remembrance_, she'd said, and he saw them now, her eyes, saw right down to the agelessness of them. It was almost as if she'd known…

But no, he pushed back on the wild thought, he was here, in this drab pale room; a patient. A suicide attempt. A surly survivor. He was Eric Huntsman, cut up and left to dry from his loss. _This_ was real: the bed was hard beneath him, the IV itchy in his hand, and the sound of Janice sweeping glass into the dust pan was…

There was no sound. Eric looked up quickly, expecting his rumination to have lasted long enough for Janice to finish her clean up and slip quickly from his room. But she hadn't. She was standing before him, the hand broom frozen in the air, the dust pan likewise tilted in her tight grip. She was rigid, her chest rising and falling with force, and her eyes were focused intently on the drawing in his hands.

"Janice?" He said her name softly. She blinked, many times and rapidly; she jerked, like a machine freshly-wound.

"What is that?" she asked, her voice suddenly hollow, void of anything he recognized.

Eric had the sudden impulse to hide the drawing, get it out of her sight. He didn't. "Its nothing," he lied, "just something I found."

"_Found_?" The word was a hiss of doubt.

Eric shuddered as though a chill wind had sprung up. Nonsense, he chided himself. Yet, he couldn't understand this sudden change in his friend and coworker, nor did he like the way she stood before him, like a puppet hanging from invisible strings. The bristled plastic broom took on the shape of something more menacing; the glass shards glinted under the fluorescent lights.

"Yes," he confirmed, his voice a bit stronger, "found." He folded up the paper then, and tucked it beside him. Janice's gaze followed it, and when it was out of sight, her eyes narrowed in on his face. Her gaze was sharper than he'd ever known it, darker and furrowed. She stared at him, unblinking.

Eric reached out to her. "Janice, are you okay?"

He didn't touch her; she snapped out of it before he could. Janice straightened -he realized know how she'd been bent, crouched toward him, like a hunched feline, readying as if to pounce- and her demeanor turned less strange, shifted to something softer, normal. She cracked a smile; a familiar sight breaking forth from the canvas of frightening blankness. But it looked off, stretched. False. Eric could feel his skin crawl as she pressed a reassuring hand to his arm.

"Sorry, darling. Must have zoned out there for a moment," she reasoned without conviction, her voice returning to the twangy melody he remembered. She looked to her dust pan and chuckled. "Well, the housework's done. I'll just get back to my station."

She moved from the room quickly, without another word. She passed beneath the arch of the door and disappeared to the right. Eric released a small burst of air between his teeth and relaxed his tightened muscles. He hadn't realized how deeply the bizarre moment had effected him. Eric shook his head, trying to force some of the strangeness from it. He looked down to the folded drawing, sticking at an odd angle under the ruffle of white sheets, and then to the skin of his forearm where Janice had rested her hand. His fingers moved toward it and paused.

The feeling that overcame him was familiar, haunting. He tried to remember its origin: a sweet sickness, a desperate terror.

A black memory lunged at him. The motel… the diner… the graveyard! Urgency burned him; anger and fear as well. With sudden conviction he knew: he needed to get out of the hospital. Eric flung aside the sheets and stood. This time however, his stance was sure. His heart sang a roaring tune inside the cage of his ribs; determination set his course, fueled his limbs.

Eric pulled the needle from his hand and tossed it aside. Already he felt stronger, the aches and pains shrugging off his shoulders like a discarded cloak, feeling distant as though a faraway dream. He closed his hand around the drawing, its message thumping deep inside his chest.

_Red for remembrance_.

And he did remember. He remembered it all. It strung out before his eyes. The pull of whim to an old haunt, and the haunting of his own soul. His recurring dreams of the girl with the braid of black hair, tender lips, and soft skin.

_Snow_. His heart leapt at the taste of her name.

He didn't know then why he sought her so desperately and even now he was not sure. The answer felt only a heartbeat away, like a raindrop on the other side of a windowpane. He could almost see it, shimmering in its lovely creation. He felt the truth was near, but so many other questions lay just before it. Understanding was of the greatest importance now. He needed to find Dr. Muir. Eric was sure an apology would feature in his future; he was more than ready to listen now.

At the door, Eric felt the familiar pull to the nurses' station. He stayed his feet however. The episode only moments prior gave his heart pause. Something wasn't right and he wasn't sure now if Janice was the friend he needed in this moment. Eric strode straight out of his room, making for the elevators at the end of the hall.

As he walked he noted the strange quiet of the hall. The rooms he passed were empty and dark; he heard neither the chatter of machines, nor the sound of staff. It was as if the entire floor was abandoned. Unrest settled between his heaving lungs but he pressed on.

Eric reached the end of the hall and turned toward the elevators. A small _pop!_ reached his ears then and Eric glanced behind at the following sound. The way he had only just walked was darkening, each bright fluorescent rectangle of light going out with a soft noise. It was just like a horror movie. Only this was happening for real. One by one the lights clicked off with a static buzz, as though someone was simply flicking a switch. Eric jammed the down button on the wall, calling the elevator, and turned round to face the approaching darkness. Naively he wondered if it was only an electrical malfunction; deep in his heart, he knew it's true cause. The hall plunged into growing darkness, a darkness that was reaching out to envelope him. Coming for him. Distantly he thought he could hear the mechanical clank and whir of the lift beginning it's climb through the shaft, although it could have been the stuttered rush of blood through his veins, his mind chirping frantically. He hoped for the elevator.

The lights faded out until finally only the light of the elevator square remained. He waited in its bright glow, his heart pounding in his ears. The lights above him flickered. There was a soft press of air around him, caressing him, like a gentle intake through cold lips. The lights dimmed terribly. But they did not go out. A darkness beyond compare faced him, gaping like an endless hole, a black wound in the world. Eric waited.

From the darkness stepped the figure from before: the man from the graveyard that was not to have existed. Eric felt a familiar prick of rage and terror. He fought them both down; he needed to keep a level head.

"You've… _changed_," Eric said, and truly, the figure had. It was not the hastily composed shadowed being from before. The size and shape were similar: the outline of his frame was drawn the same, but there was a wholeness to it now. Gone was the illusion barely holding itself together. A solid man stood now beneath the lights instead of the creature he'd faced in the dark of his hotel, and the pale light of the graveyard. This man was tall. Tight muscles hid themselves in his thin frame. He wore a suit of black and his skin glared pale in contrast. His face was split into a smile, something Eric felt he knew all too well. His hair was white.

The man seemed to regard his appearance with a look of pleasant surprise. "Yes," he said. His voice had lost none of it's grating quality. "It appears I have. For the better I think."

Eric felt a bristle of opposition. He crossed his arms. "Not from what I see," he argued.

The man tilted his head, his lips forming a quick tight line. Then the smile returned in sharp respite. He took a step forward; the darkness moved behind him, like him: slow and slithering.

"Ah," he said, in a voice amused, "the bull snorts. But look how _fragile_-" he drew out the word on his lips, savoring it like something rare and delicious "-he is inside." He laughed. It was terrible. "You think we can't see what you hide, Huntsman, but we know you. All of you. All your _sticky red bits_."

Eric didn't back down. He couldn't. "Is that so?" he challenged.

"Yes," hissed the man, his grin now razor sharp. "We are stronger now," he formed a fist, his knuckles going white. "We are not bound to mere shadows and trickery."

He thought of the terror in his apartment, the hospital room, Janice: all of it, an illusion. "Is that was this is then, some parlor trick?" Eric remembered the same words leaving his mouth before, and the consequence.

The man passed on the small insult with a wave of his pale hand. "We learned long ago how easy it is to play with your mind, Huntsman."

The walls around Eric shuddered for a moment and then, as easily as the flip of a leaf on the wind, the silver elevator doors disappeared and became one with the deep brown paneling. Eric bit back a rumble of frustration and turned instead a steady gaze at the man-creature before him.

"Granted," it continued, "you have learned some tricks of your own. That drawing was clever. Very clever."

Eric felt a surge of pleasure at these words. The man was put off, annoyed. And Eric liked that.

"So what now," he challenged, feeling a bit of strength rolling back into his shoulders, "are you gonna hocus-pocus me somewhere else next? Make me believe I'm some traveling salesman; drop me to the bottom of the ocean? Because I think that act has passed its prime." There was a tremor to his voice that could not be denied and a spark flamed up inside him. This time Eric took the step forward.

"See, I'm remembering those dreams," he continued. "You know about those right? All those recurring imaginings. Coming to me, haunting me…?"

His mind moved to a fleeting image: Snow, dipping into the lake, her dress clinging to her skin, water lingering on her lips. He felt a heat pass through him and smiled.

"And I've been thinking that they weren't really dreams. I mean, they were, but they were more, you see. Or maybe you don't. So let me spell it out for you: they were memories. Sweet, beautiful memories. Clues about me, for me. Maybe she left them, maybe I clung to them with my dying breath all those other times you say we've encountered each other. Regardless, I know what they are now."

The smile slipped off the man's face as though it had been cut. His pale features turned furrowed and fierce.

"Ha!" Eric laughed, taking another step closer, "I guess you didn't know that. Well, those memories are telling me something. And do you want to know what it is?" Eric remembered the gingham dress, her face before the golden sunset, the smell of earth and sun. He remembered the touch of her hand, the press of her body against his, the feel of her lips… he did not wait for the man to answer. "That there's a chance, a chance I do save her. A chance for me to find her again, to make the right choice now, whatever that may be. I win, and you lose."

Eric felt the rumble of his words course through him, the sparks flaming bright and bold. Bits and pieces of his lives, he supposed, came back to him. Each tender _almost_ to every terrible _never_. He felt a hatred for himself but a greater desire for her; he longed to undo his past, all his pasts, break the cycle, the curse, whatever. He wanted only her. He needed her. He needed to tip the scales, for once and always. With a grin, he recalled the doctor's words from earlier and found his answer had suddenly become something different and sure.

Maybe he believed in fate and maybe he didn't. But he believed in her. Perhaps that was enough.

The man's eyes narrowed. The pupils danced like an oiled ocean on fire. He curled up a lip and his porcelain face cracked; fissures like scars appeared in his cheeks, clawing through his eye sockets. The darkness behind him boiled. It churned and howled the voices of years long dead.

"Silly little man. You try so hard. You bark and bite. But we are ever victorious. We keep the way. From the beginning until the end. We will ever stand over your broken pieces. We lap your blood in the streets. We gnaw on your bones!" The man's voice had become a creature's shriek. The darkness gathered and roiled and howled behind him, moving forward. The light in the last of the hall had dimmed so low it was now near impossible to see. The man was coming apart, shredding into pieces. His face twisted in anger and fury. He hovered over Eric and Eric trembled. He had faced this before, he had trembled and feared and cried out as he was ended. He clutched at his chest in recollection of panic and pain and bit back the screams from long ago.

"You cannot defeat us! You cannot escape us!"

The darkness wound around him, grabbing at his arms and legs, pulling and scratching. It caught at his face and his hair, dug into the corner of his mouth. It howled and screamed. It cut into him and did not stop until it hit bone and then continued on.

Eric struggled. He fought and growled. He felt the strength in his arms, the fight of his spirit and he did not waver. He tore at the darkness, looking for a weakness. Any open spot. But the dark felt only like an endless pool; it sucked in his punches, absorbed the blow of his kicks, slithered out between his teeth. He cried out: murmurs against the vast and endless.

The sounds of the dark rose to that of a mighty wind, roaring in the small and now blackened enclosure. Only a small bit of white remained: the slit of an eye, the tip of a razor smile. The darkness laughed at him.

"We keep the way, Huntsman. You fail yet again. We bring your end. We, the curse of your own guilt, made strong and evermore." It gathered itself in a ebony cloud and drew itself high and towering over him. Erick looked up. And he dismayed. For the briefest moment, he wondered if this death would be as all the others: merciless. Then, did he deserve anything else? Failure had come again. It was his curse.

Words sparked from his memory.

"Curses are strong," he said, his voice a whisper amid the torrent. "Love is stronger still."

Eric closed his eyes and remembered her. His Snow.

_She is caught in the brambles, her dress twisted in the fingers of branches, grasping still though they were long dead. She looks like a caught rabbit, frightening and huffing. Her pale skin and her dark hair; her fearful eyes as he moves toward her, some giant gruff cut of a man. Or a man he once might have been. She holds back her cry as he brandishes his knife and puts it to the hem of her dress._

_The cloth rips and falls to the bog._

_For a moment decorum is remembered and then abandoned. She pulls her arms up from attempting to cover her legs. Fear has been replaced with something else._

_It staggers his stature. It stirs the dust layering his tired heart. She does not look to him with contempt, nor revulsion. Not even sadness rings her green eyes. No, she harbors there only belief, deeper than the trust she will come to have of him. A spark only, but it will grow._

_Belief. In him._

"Snow," he called, desperately, hopefully, tenderly. "I won't forget you."

The darkness took him.

. . .

Eric felt himself slip away, slip apart. Arms, legs, bone, muscle, feeling, hope...

The dark tore him slowly apart. And he tried, he tried terribly to hold on. His lips formed her name and the wind took it from him.

He held his eyes shut as the world and the after world and everything in between fled by him. Rushed by him. Rushed through him.

Snow. He said to the screaming air, the blinding dark.

Snow. He prayed.

_Snow._

How easy it would be to give up. How simple to turn away.

No.

Eric fought back. He dug in. He held on. He clawed with fists and heels and fought back. Climbing, lifting one heavy limb over the other. Crawling, up and up. The darkness screamed. It ripped at him but found no purchase. It tried to bite and swallow and push. But Eric pushed past it, through it, beyond it. He cursed it at: beautiful words of love; of ages and lifetimes once lost now regained, all the words he longed to have spoken, all the desires he wished he could have made his own. It fought him, but was growing feeble. It ripped apart beneath his fists. As though it hadn't a chance. Eric fought with determination, with purpose. He wouldn't allow this to be his fate. Not again. Not ever. He climbed and felt renewed, hopeful for the first time. He slipped and started again. Eric climbed and crawled and reached...

_Come find me_, she said.

_I will_, he answered.


	10. Chapter 10

_Notes and Apologies:_ for real, it isn't my fault this time. I have been without a computer for months and so far buried in work I swear I haven't seen the daylight. But here is a new chapter, copied from my scribbly-scrawl notebooks on this itty bitty netbook I borrowed from my dearest. Better late than never? *hopes*

_Thank Yous and Shout Outs:_ much enduring love for **sulou**, **LenaLove95**, **Amanthya**, **ktikat13**, and **hlee0890**!. Here's another thankful shout out to **cmb897** and **C. I. TigerFan**: thank you for each and every lovely review! Just for your patience, I gift you these chapters!

* * *

_**take me to the water  
take me to the river  
take me under your skin**_

"I feel as though I have been long in a dark forest."

Eric let the words pass his lips, caught in the last strands of sleep, coming back into the world of the living. He hoped.

A voice answered. Somewhere off to his left, "That you have been, my boy."

Coolness was spread over Eric's brow, dampening and weighing down upon his closed eyelids. He could feel the sun's warmth on his bare arms, but could not hear the usual accompanying sounds of nature; neither was the softness beneath his stretched and relaxed frame a bed of earth, tendered by moss and leaf.

Eric stiffened and groped for the object on his face—a wet cloth. He sat up, too quickly.

The room swam into focus and out again, so sharp-lined and bright he almost cried out, flinging his other hand back across his face.

"But I'd hardly call our copse of graveyard oaks a forest, really." The voice continued without disturbance, even-toned. "Though you were beneath them perhaps an entire evening. And a chilled one at that."

Eric removed the hand slowly from his face and swung his eyes about the room. The stench of darkness ate at his nerves, his arms, like the thought of lice or other crawling terrors, prickling his spine and scalp. He resisted the urge to swat and dig into his flesh. There was no darkness here; even the corners seemed empty of the shadows that naturally lurked there. If _it _was hiding in this room, it had certainly upped its game.

The room was wide and populated with rugs, armchairs, and bordered with bookshelf-lined walls. One wall, the one directly facing him, housed four large windows, all entirely stained glass. The sun shone strongly through the panes, lighting great colorful pictorials of the Bible: angels stood upon the necks of vanquished demons; Jesus sat upon a hill a green as emeralds, children surrounding Him and seated upon His knee; a sea tossed a boat full of praying fisherman…

"A church," breathed Eric, almost to himself, as the realization dawned.

"Well, technically, a parsonage," came the voice again, tenderly. "But who cares for semantics these days."

Eric remembered then he was not alone and his eyes sought to the left where, in a lovely and elderly armchair sat a likewise leathery old man. He was small and the chair rose around him like it had been crafted for a much larger man. His features spoke of a youth he stubbornly clung to despite his years' persuasion. He wore an old and grass-stained pare of overalls, and a red bandana was tucked into the pocket of his grey shirt. A book was perched on his knee and grass clippings littered the carpet around his feet.

"Hullo," greeted the man, amiably, his expression open and perhaps a bit amused.

"Hello," returned Eric, feeling both very tiny –like an insect under a microscope- and yet at complete ease. Water leaked from his tight fist between his knuckles. The coolness brought him suddenly to order.

"Um…" he began and stopped lamely. The man only smiled.

"You're wondering, I suppose, a great many things," he said. "Let me start. I'm Pastor Beith. My groundskeeper and I found you in the graveyard at dawn, beyond waking and caked in frost. We brought you here, where you've slept for the better part of the day on that couch." His voice was without frustration or suspicion. "We've taken turns watching you, Robert, my grounds man, and I. Or perhaps," he scratched his chin, humor dancing in his eyes, "I've only played at it. Robert believes you to be some crazed criminal, out in the dark of last night to break in and steal the silver, struck down only by the just Hand of God." The man shrugged. "I have no doubt in my Lord's power, but I don't see 'silver stealing ruffian' in your bearing, young man. Although, my judgment of character could have waned in the years."

Eric did not miss the raise of a grayed eyebrow. "Oh, no, Reverend," he put up his hands defensively. "I'm no deviant," Eric assured him.

"Good," the pastor laughed. "Robert's a good man, but I fear he watches too much late night television."

The book was closed and the pastor stood. He was a small man even standing, Eric noticed, and something about him was strangely familiar. Pastor Beith extended a hand to Eric, who handed off the washcloth.

"I've half a sandwich here, if you're hungry," said the man, moving to a drawer on the large desk at the front of the room. "It's egg salad." The sandwich triangle was set on the polished wood table before Eric, who snatched it up gratefully, suddenly famished.

"Thank you," he mumbled around wheat bread and egg lathered in mayonnaise.

The pastor nodded. "It isn't much," he said, returning to lean against the desk front. "But my Martha never lets me leave the house without, seems to think I don't stop for lunch when I'm at work." He paused and then added, "Perhaps some food will loosen the answer to the mystery of you stretched beneath our trees. You're too alive to be looking for a burial, so we can rule that out at least." He offered a smile to his own words and Eric felt a genuine affection for the man. He had a quiet humor about him, and Eric found his company to be a comfort. It was too long since he'd felt this at ease.

"I think I can offer some answers already," Eric said, after clearing his throat.

Eric remembered every detail, some stronger than others and some despite a desire to forget. This was different than before, whenever the befores had been. He just knew it. He felt so close now, so strong. It was as if he had only to reach out his hand and she, his saving grace, would appear. Like a magic trick. Like a miracle.

What better place.

But then yet was the situation ever more dire than all the times before. Time snapped at him, like a dog with sharp teeth for the scent of his blood. He felt the tick of the seconds under his skin, stuttering against the beat of his heart. Pressing against his chest like a weight.

"I was… _am_ looking for someone. I heard the Sunday bells and followed them, knowing I would find answers. I…" he paused, the encounter of the shadow man beneath the trees stuck to his tongue like lead. He thought of all else, everything that followed, the tug and despair of reality against dream, corroding like rust to metal. All crashing together until he hardly knew what was true… until her.

Some dark things should not be shared.

He laughed a little, covering the long tracks of his silence.

"I might have tripped," he struggled with the words, the lie. He reached for his head to give the story weight. "Anyway, I am glad you found me, sir."

Eric could hear the force to his story, the inflection and tone in the wrong places. But the pastor did not appear to doubt him.

"Well, if there's anything to be done in recompense for your injury, lad, do let us know."

Eric swallowed his last bite of egg salad sandwich and followed it with a mouthful of water from the glass the pastor gave him. It was pure and cold and refreshing.

"You've done more than your share, Pastor," Eric told him sincerely. "But if I could beg of one thing?"

Pastor Beith nodded.

"The person I'm looking for," Eric began. "A girl. She lived here long ago. I don't know for sure if she still does. But I need to know… and so I am trying to find her…"

Eric faltered. He knew perfectly how Snow fit into his memory, and beneath the skin, wrapped around his bones. He knew how she possessed his dreams, indeed his very soul. The girl with the braid of black hair, who beckoned him into the water, whose lips tasted like sun, skin as pale as the moonlight. But what good was this to anyone else? No one had these dreams of her; no one else was propelled miles in search of the tiniest trace of her existence. How did she pass her day to day wherever she waited for him?

"She is lovely," Eric finally continued. "Black hair. Skin like…" he felt the weight and chill of the word, "snow." Then, as if drawn from some deep forgotten well, words poured from his mouth like water, rushing over dusty lips.

"She smiles and it's like it grabs your hand, and you don't want to let go. She was full of life more than her youth could hold; she ran everywhere and did not listen when her father told her not to climb the trees. Her knees were scraped always, and her dresses torn. But she laughed. Oh, how she used to laugh." He could hear that laughter now. "She found a bird once, and took it home. Its wing was crumpled."

Her young face rose in his mind, tear-stained and determined, full of love and hope and heartbreak. Her visage moved from a child to a young woman, rippled like a reflection in water. The broken winged bird became changed in his mind's eye into his own arm, bloodied and bent and bandaged from a battle long forgotten, her hands still white and as gentle as if he were nothing more than a terrified flightless raven…

Eric shook his head, clearing the tremor that accompanied these memories.

"She was unearthly kind, to all things," he finished softly.

Eric then chuckled and pushed his palms against the fabric of his jeans. "I'm sorry, sir. This isn't anything to go on. I wish I could give you a name."

The small man had been watching him throughout his speech, listening carefully. Propped against the side of his desk, his face had changed. Eric was stilled by the look that now took over the elderly pastor. It was a great and terrible burden that tugged down his eyes, creased his brow. Pastor Beith looked all of his years now, in that moment, and sad.

"What?" The word was harsher than he meant and Eric immediately regretted it. But his heartbeat had quickened, an urgency rising in his chest. "What it is?"

"My dear boy," said the pastor, wiping a hand across his cheek. "Have you long searched for this girl?"

Eric thought of all the times he could remember, sharp and painful, tender and loving. He thought of all the times he had surely forgotten, endless circles in the sand, lines of grief and guilt and hope.

"Yes," he answered, simply, softly.

"Then I am more so saddened to tell you that I believe I know this girl. Tender, beautiful young thing. Her father was a dedicated parishioner and she as well, before he passed."

Eric was on his feet, standing without realizing he'd risen. Blood coursed through him, hot and swift. He felt every pump of his heart, every bead of sweat stand out on his skin.

"Her name is Sylvi. Sylvi White. People who knew her closely called her 'Snow'."

The pastor was not meeting his eyes. Eric felt a quake begin in his hands. He clenched his fists and willed his heart to slow. It was beating so hard he was sure it would come free of his ribs.

"_Knew_?" he echoed, the word feeling like poison on his tongue.

The pastor looked up. "She's dying, my boy. Has been for years."

_Save me_. She said it to him so many times, whispered into his ear, breathed against his chest, tattooed into his skin.

_Save me._

Eric took a step back. For a moment he broke apart. Everything within him came loose, came apart like he was made of cloth and stuffing and wires and gears. Everything burst forth from inside, expanding out like an explosion. It rocked his body, his blood, his bone. It tore him to pieces; it spat him into the carpet, over the walls. It bellowed like a scream.

But he was silent. The moment passed him. He was standing, holding in the fire and the flame, all his inner tender parts, clamped behind his lips, his clenched teeth.

He opened his eyes. He regained the lost step. He looked down at the pastor, into his sad-sloped eyes.

"Take me to her," he said, his voice level, masking the entire ache. "Please."


	11. Chapter 11

_**find out: i was just a bad dream  
**_

. . .

The shady lane spoke to him. It said hello, greeted him like an old friend. The uneven pavement. The road overhung with leafy boughs. The bent street sign. Everything was so familiar.

Only one home occupied the street. It stood at the end of the short drive, surrounded by a high fence. Trees stood in the yard. Trees that looked larger in his memory.

Eric pulled up at the curb, the truck's engine left idling. Pastor Beith looked at him from the passenger seat.

"The mayor's house?" Eric asked, for the second time. The pastor nodded. "It looks the very same," Eric mused quietly.

He'd expected something as he stepped out of the cab. A _feeling _perhaps, a _knowing_. She was inside, just twenty some-odd yards away. His Snow. So close.

He expected relief. Instead he felt numb.

He felt hollow.

. . .

A voice crackled at him from the speaker at the gate. The same voice paused with uncertainty. Finally, a buzz let him in, passing under an iron-twisted arch that spelled "Ravenwood".

Eric felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather pass over him as he walked up the driveway. The white gravel crunched under his feet. He stuck his hands in his pockets then drew them out to wring them together. They found their way to the back of his neck, rubbing at aches that didn't exist, and then back to his pockets by the time he reached the ornate front door.

He felt a shadow over him. The sky was cloudless. The wind, soft. And yet there was a nagging in the pit of his stomach, born of nerves perhaps. But it had the weight of something more, something he knew he ought not to dismiss. A noise turned his head, his eyes scanning the spaces beneath the trees, the edges of the gardens, the corners of the windows.

Nothing. He shrugged off the paranoia, and every other thought from his head.

One foot before the other. He concentrated on walking, moving himself forward, bringing him to the door.

The door opened and a sour-faced man stood before him. A wave of unease moved through him. The man was light-haired, thin to the point of looking much like a pale refugee. He looked annoyed. He looked vile. Eric followed him into the house.

He seemed to be moving outside himself. He seemed to be floating, as if only thought and nostalgia connected him to his body. He followed the man into the home, not looking at the walls or the floors or the wealth or the empty spaces. He may have caught a glimpse of bright new carpet, the corner of a bold painting, the smooth curve of the staircase railing, the thin black lines beneath closed doors.

Then they were stopped. Paused outside a plain white door, like all the others he'd already passed.

The doorman opened this door. His hand turned the knob, slowly it seemed. So very slowly. And yet too fast. Too terribly fast. Eric wanted to tell him to stop. _Wait!_ He wasn't ready. He couldn't. But he could. But he needed a minute and then had none at all.

. . .

The room beyond was dim. A small bedside table lamp was all that lit the room. The shadows lunged toward him, feeling him out as he stepped inside. They wrapped around him, made his skin itch.

The clean scent of medicine came upon him, overwhelmed him. His eyes adjusted to the light and the absence of it. His eyes swiveled, taking in the sparse furnishings, the beeping machines, the curtain-covered windows.

Last they found the bed, standing in the center of the room. Resting before him like the Holy Grail upon a stone altar.

And like a precious artifact, like a priceless art piece, there she lay.

Eric crumpled. The floor fell away and he with it, almost sinking to his knees. His breath burst from his lungs, and came back with desperate gulps. His body shook. Everything rushed in at him: memory spread his mind wide, flayed his skin and tendons, his muscle and veins, straight to the marrow.

Beautiful Snow. His Snow. Coming to him in dreams, beckoning him, wetting his lips with her lips, setting fire to his skin with her touch. Filling him with hope, with longing, with love. Every lonely night, every fierce gamble, every loss, every victory. Every scar burned fresh as the day it was gifted him. Every pain searing again and strong.

He broke beneath it. And rose again.

It had come for him. It had tried to stop him. The very world had dragged him beneath, tried to end him. Balance the scales; let everything remain the same. An endless wheel, turning in grief and shame. He had endured it; he had overcome.

_Save me, _she'd beckoned.

He approached the bed.

She was the girl from his dreams, the girl from his memory. Yet she was different. Smaller perhaps, paler, almost translucent. He swore he could see her blue veins beneath her skin.

Her black hair spread around her head, like a dark halo. Her eyes were closed and bruised in crescent moons under her eyelashes. Around her bed stood beeping machines, like a mechanical audience. Tubes ran out from the machines, one to her hand, and another to her index finger. A final clear tube bent across her face, beneath her nose.

Eric moved to touch her. So familiar a desire, so easy from all the times, in all his dreams, in all his pasts. He pulled back his hand inches from her skin.

Snow.

Tears came into his eyes and fell down his cheeks. He tasted salt on his lips. He felt himself tremble.

_Save me,_ she'd called out to him. Through his dreams, across the years.

He remembered dreaming they were at the edge of the river, the sunlight golden all around them. Her waist under his palm. The heat of her breath. The tender embrace of passion. Life shimmered from her eyes and at the corner of her mouth.

Eric fell to his knees. The hard floor bit into his legs.

_Save me,_ she'd whispered as he'd slept in a waiting room chair, covering his eyes with a pale hand.

His hand found hers then, suddenly, without reserve. The coldness of it seared him.

"I'm here," he said, his voice a whisper in the shadowed room. "I've come to save you."

He bent lips to hers. The touch was true, soft. He felt so forward, even after all this time. As though he was moving too fast, taking liberties. But it was right, it was real. Her lips did not yield beneath his; they did not return his gesture of love. She remained still. Eyes shut and ringed with fragile lashes, unmoving. The machines beeped onward, never a stutter or a break in line or beat.

Some lost part of his heart, some young and believing part hoped she'd wake. That his kiss would rouse her, wake her with a gasp and a flicker of lovely eyes.

Snow White slept on.

Too simply a task. To small a token. Eric gripped her hand, gentle and needy.

The silence that followed was tender and terrible. It was brief. It was sliced, severed:

"Well, isn't this _adorable_."

The voice dripped from lips painted red, pulled up in a tight line. It was something like a smile, but drawn beneath eyes that narrowed and flashed with such fierceness, Eric knew the phrase came not with tenderness. There was a vicious chill in the tone, something that dug into him and latched like claws.

He straightened, slowly, his warm hand wrapping more tightly around Snow's pale one. He had the urge to stay crouched, to angle himself between Snow and this woman who stood amid the shadows as though they flowed from her and not from the hidden places under the sun. She showed teeth, briefly. Again, Eric had the distinct feeling it was a representation of a smile, but one gone wrong. It looked feral and fierce, a flash of dominance in a wild land. He felt himself shiver and shift, his shoulders roll and his feet finding sure footing; a challenge was met in some subconscious plain.

She was tall and thin and lovely, in the way something dangerous could also lure and tempt. She wore a suit of black, it gripped her pale thin frame. It cut off high, showing leg, and low, revealing the arch of her breasts. Her arms were crossed. Her eyes were cold jewels. Her hair was piled in golden braids.

She had an air of age about her. The sort that spoke of power and use and knowledge, gained and stolen. It was a dangerous feeling that wafted over him. A wary feeling.

This was the mayor. This was Ravenna White.

The air tensed and crackled. He could feel the press of the empty space, the flick of floating dust motes against the erect hair on his arms.

The mayor came forward, heels clicking against the hardwood. She was a blank canvas in his mind; he did not know her. He had never known her before. But he was not about to underestimate her.

She stood before him. Tall, as tall as he was. Her eyes leveled evenly with him. They were shiny orbs, masked expertly, swirling with inner workings to her soul that he could not name.

"So," she said, her voice even, her tone disconnected as though it held no care. "You are the thorn in my side?"

Eric did not speak. Her eyes trailed down him, like a hungry beast looking over it's next prey. They gave away nothing as they followed the length of him and came back to his eyes.

"Not much of you left, is there?" She reached out with a perfectly manicured nail, making to run it along his cheek. Eric turned away. Her finger lingered in the air a moment, like a lecturer punctuating an important moment. It was dropped back to her side and something like a laugh escaped her lips.

"Come now," Ravenna chided, like a mother reprimanding her child for a bad deed. "Recoiling from me? _You?_" The last was said in such a way that it made him almost ashamed he'd turned from her touch.

He held her gaze and said nothing. His hand tightened on Snow's.

The mayor looked down at her hands, ran them over each other. It was a habitual movement, the kind that said she'd rather have them doing something else. Something bloody, perhaps. Eric tried to shake the severity of thoughts from his head but could not. Every sense was on fire, everything crackling and tightening for a fight, a snarl and roar. There was something vast that spread out from this woman, so ordinary –blonde and severely-suited and beautiful- and yet so fearsome, like an ageless monster waited on her heels to lap up the blood she spilled.

Her eyes had moved from him, they looked now to Snow, asleep and suspended therein on the edge of life by the connection to the machines. There was a tenderness to her features, but something wistful that turned dark at the corners.

"My daughter," she said, half to herself, the word coming into the air with a touch of something. Regret? Disgust?

Her eyes brushed over Snow's hand and Eric's, entwined, knuckles white. They moved up and away, and Ravenna moved with them. She stepped away, her arm coming across her stomach and her fingers reaching up to pat away imaginary loose hairs.

"This is new, do you know that?" She asked, pacing away and turning back.

Eric nodded. He didn't know how he knew, he just did. Everything was different.

"These hands," she mused, turning her pale fingers in the air before her face, examining them. "It's been so long."

He looked at her, sizing her up. She hadn't given him a choice. She'd come into the room as an enemy. No guessing, no secrets. And he felt a little bit of pride. Eric smiled. Days ago (it seemed ages) he'd have recoiled perhaps, second-guessed himself, all of this, disbelieving. He was new now, reborn, victorious. He would not back down.

"All this time," he said, "hiding behind your shadow soldiers." He chuckled and she rippled in anger, shimmering like heat waves in the sun.

Her rage simmered away. Her blonde braids clung to her scalp like dormant snakes, standing out brightly against the growing dark of the setting sun, the painfully small halo of lamp light.

"It is nothing," she answered. "You are nothing."

Eric felt a surge go through him. "I am enough," he roared back.

She laughed at that. Threw her head back and laughed.

"It matters not," she said when her mirth subsided. "You dance around the eventuality. You grow at odd angles, refusing to fit into the holes of the world. What do you win? A minor moment; a small victory. You think you have upset the balance? You think you have misled the river, but it will always find its way. This is fate. This is the unchangeable equation." She loomed in the darkness, edging closer, drawing the darkness toward her like a hungering pup. "I am the result."

From the folds of her black dress she pulled a knife. It was a dagger. A silver strip of metal, tapered, polished to a razor-sharp double edge. It sat in the palms of her hands, rested like a prayer. It was an answer. It was a beautiful sacrifice waiting for the blood to sanctify it.

"End this," she said. Her voice was a hiss. A command. The eventual truth.

Eric felt the fury inside him. He let it fuel him. Grow a bold fire. A raging flame. "No."

She stared at him, eyes rimmed in black. Eyes wide. "Excuse me?"

"I said no," Eric repeated, his voice strong.

"No, what?" The knife caught a sideways ray of light and shone.

"No, this is not how it will end," he said, steady, although his shoulders sagged. "Not again."

"Yes," said Ravenna, coming close to him. So close he could breathe her in. She smelled of decay and darkness and death.

He saw it all. Every other moment that had passed them by, that had defined them. Every other beat had served as ending and beginning: the endless cycle. It flickered before his eyes.

He would take the knife. He would press it into his chest. He would die for all the times that he had lived. He would pay the price of his cowardice with his life. His worst moment, the scrapings of his soul, bathed in his shed blood. Washed away. The ending, fuel for a new beginning. Purgatory, Hell awaited. All of them: he and Snow and the dark man and the woman that stood before him, all tied together, all bathed in his blood. Drug along to the next life, pulled into shapes and reality and heartbreak and dreams. Never ending. Another death. Another shame.

Eric closed his eyes. _Never ending cycle._

"Don't you see," she said, her voice velvet and sickness, turning upward from the base of his throat, rising from her poison lips to his ear. "This is the only way. The only outcome. The end and the beginning. You fail. You ever reach and you only fall." This time her touch reached him. It ran a cold line down his cheek and over his chin. "There is no greater act than that of sacrifice for the one you love."

The word on her lips sounded sweet, sickly sweet. Terrible, something twisted and horrid.

Love.

"_Love is stronger still."_

Such an ideal. Such a feeling. Such a catalyst.

He'd done it before. He'd embraced the tip of a blade for her. Always for her. Snow, caught in a half-life, at the edge of the world of the living always. His beautiful strong girl, deconstructed into something tender and needy and fragile. This wasn't her. He looked to her sleeping face. Her still frame. This wasn't as she was intended, not even from the first.

_Inside a cage of twisted roots. Her breathing shallow, her limbs quiet. The stench of the forest, the crumpled of the dirt and leaves beneath her. He is the hunter, looking for the weak lamb. But she isn't hiding. She is surviving. She is living. She is waiting._

Understanding gripped him. Burned in him.

Eric took the blade in his hand. It was cold. It was heavy. It glinted. Ravenna's eyes shined.

Tears crept into his eyes. Along the watery beds swam the memory of his dreams. Of Snow.

_She trailed through the golden wheat… she gathered her skirts at the edge of the river… she ran a hand down his chest… she relaxed in the fold of his arms. She smiled. She laughed. She kissed him, long and slow and tender…_

Eric looked down at her. He clung to her. He breathed in and inhaled her. His chest twisted and an ache caught in his throat.

"Forgive me," he whispered.

Ravenna watched, her eyes sharpening in expectation. Eric raised the knife.

. . .

_The moment froze. _

End the cycle.

_The moment broke._

. . .

Eric turned. Eric plunged the blade.

A cry escaped him, rent from the core of his soul, torn from the lining of his form. Yet it was overwhelmed with the scream of the woman. She shrieked and wailed and rushed at him, clawing at his arms, screaming like the force of a cloud of ravens. She tugged at his arms but it was too late.

Blood pooled from the wound, bubbled at the hilt of the blade protruding from Snow's chest. Eric cried again, loud and long. His agony ripping out of him in a roar, a beast howling to a merciless moon. He pushed the blade in deeper, feeling the blade as sharply as if he'd cut it into his own heart. He pushed and felt the pain.

Ravenna tore away from him. Screaming, clawing now at her face, her hair, her clothes. Darkness came off between her fingers, under her fingernails. Blonde hair turned pale, then white. Her smooth skin bubbled with and bunched, wrinkled and puckered. She screamed again, hunkering over, bending in on herself. Age came quickly. Age came harshly.

Eric watched her writhe and scream. He watched her stretch into the darkness, and contract. He watched as she fell to the floor, crying and screaming and fading.

His eyes clung to Snow. His Snow. Growing paler, growing more still, losing the life to which she'd clung. Holding on, lingering long enough, just enough to come to him. To beg him. To wait for him to save her, finally. Completely.

His ears let the blare of machines be her cry, her death sob. It cut him. It hurt him.

He released the blade with a shock of movement. Eric slumped to his knees. The gasps and sobs broke him in two. It flattened him to the floor.

Ravenna's screams echoed and then faded. Eric didn't see her go. He was lost, stuck in spinning wheel: the glaring turn of the machines, winding down, slowing it's final song. Eric gripped the edge of the bed. He buried his head against the sheets. He wept, his body rocking. His body shaking.

The sound came. A steady sound. The sound of a dead heart. The single green line drew across his mind, without beat, without a sound. The silence of the dark and the absence of screams and the empty shell inches from his fearful, murderous fingers: it came in at him. It left him.

Eric willed the darkness to come. For the first time, it did not.


End file.
